


Number One With A Bullet

by BetteNoire (WeAreWolves)



Series: The Murder Ballads [2]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel (Comics), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: AIM - Freeform, Action/Adventure, BAMF!Bucky, Dazzler - Freeform, Hydra, It's mostly teen until Chapter 10 which is explicit, M/M, Ninjas - Freeform, Post-Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Thriller, so do with that what thou wilt
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-25
Updated: 2016-05-22
Packaged: 2018-05-23 06:00:51
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 10
Words: 53,507
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6107287
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/WeAreWolves/pseuds/BetteNoire
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>With Dazzler getting death threats ahead of a huge concert, her management hires protection for her: The Winter Soldier. Bucky and Alison hate each other on sight. But with seemingly every evil organization in the US out to kill her, they need to find a way to work together -- and get to the bottom of why everyone wants Alison Blaire dead. Of course, when Bucky can't protect Alison and investigate at the same time, there's only one person he's going to call for help: a certain star-spangled man with a plan.</p><p>  <i>Sequel to The Murder Ballads. Can be read as stand-alone, though.</i></p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Number One With A Bullet

**Author's Note:**

  * Translation into Русский available: [Номер один с пулей](https://archiveofourown.org/works/12048783) by [BlueSunrise](https://archiveofourown.org/users/BlueSunrise/pseuds/BlueSunrise)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Protecting people instead of killing them: Bucky should be used to this, but why does he always end up with the most stubborn, sassy people to protect? Why do they never listen?

Alison Blaire, Dazzler, held her hand up to shut up the A&R rep from her label as she stalked down the hallway of the Chicago rehearsal studio. Not that he had any breath at the moment, running to catch up with her. Not her problem he couldn't keep up. She was wearing 6” platform stilettos and she could still out-walk him. “I'm done talking about the death threats,” she said.

“The label isn't, Miss Blaire. And neither is the client. The concert is a week away and they don't want anything to happen.”

Alison whirled on her Gareth Pugh platforms, fury in her face. “I can _handle_ it, Williams. I always have death threats. I get fifty rape and murder threats in my twitter mentions before lunch on a Tuesday. People always gonna hate on a successful woman. I _got_ this. And I gotta _rehearse_ \--”

“We've spoken, and we've gotten you additional security for the week.”

“Uh-huh. Whatever.”

“A bodyguard.”

“Because those have worked so well in the past,” said Alison, her voice dripping with scorn for every over-roided, meathead idiot the label had shambling uselessly behind her for the past five years.

“The client is providing him. He is very qualified--”

Alison rolled her eyes and shoved the door open to the rehearsal studio. Her back-up dancers were stretching out, but they all kept throwing glances over towards the far wall, where--

_Where, what the rassclaat these idiots think dem do, hire fi me this man with the metal arm, the man who kill all dem people?_

Alison put her hands on her hips. “Oh, hell no. Send him back, Williams.”

“Ma'am,” said the bodyguard, pushing off from the wall he was leaning against and walking towards her. Black v-neck t-shirt, metal arm, faded black combat trousers and boots. Dark hair and the bluest eyes and everything hard edges, from the cut-glass cheekbones to the thickly braided muscle with no softening cover of body fat. He moved like a panther, she thought. All coiled menace. And not a bit of noise. His voice was low, rough. “I'm afraid it doesn't work that way.”

“One, do not ma'am me. I am not my grandmother. Two, it works any way I say it does. And I say you leave.”

By now the assassin was standing next to her, and inclined his head slightly to speak in her ear. His eyes were unnervingly blue. “Once a contract is accepted, it cannot be canceled except by the client. You are not the client. So. You have two choices. Get used to my presence for the next seven days, or continue to be a pain in the ass and I will kidnap you and take you to one of my safehouses somewhere extremely remote, to wait out the duration of the contract. I'm thinking Siberia, personally. You like the cold? I love it.”

Alison hauled back and slapped him as hard as she could – or at least tried to, because at the last possible moment he moved his face slightly away and her hand only connected with air.

“You're playing in some very big leagues here, Miss Blaire. If they're spending enough to bring me in, you're in a _lot_ of trouble. Trouble that you can't get out of by throwing coloured lights at it.”

“You do not talk to me like this. Nobody talks to me like this,” said Alison, reaching into her handbag. “I'm buying out your contract and then you will leave my life forever.” She pulled out a chequebook. “So, metal man. What did it cost to hire you?”

The assassin ran his fingers through his hair, shaved at the sides and longer on top like a medieval knight. “I'd have to check with the agency. I don't take many contracts on this side of the trigger. But my starting rate is normally $10 million.”

“For the week?”

“No. Per hour.” The bastard gave her this cocky half-smile. “I'm the best. I never fail.”

Alison shoved her chequebook back in her wallet. Fuck, but the client – some virtual reality company, Cadence Industries, launching new VR headsets at a concert she was headlining and providing special augmented content for – had some deep pockets. Although now she resented that the bodyguard they'd hired was costing them more than she did. She glared over at her A&R rep. “Williams, the bodyguard is not allowed to speak to me. He has to speak to you if he wants anything.” Then she clapped her hands at her dancers. “Girls, we're going to start with 'Bitch Better' and then we'll go straight into 'Victory Song'.”

 

* * *

 

For the rest of the afternoon, Bucky prowled around the rehearsal studio, watching Alison and her dancers go through the choreography for their concert. He hated the bank of windows along one side of the room. He glared at the constant stream of takeaway and delivery food that came in, any of which could be poisoned so easily. Alison may well have been a mutant with some pretty impressive light-related powers, but from an assassin's point of view, holy Christ she was an easy kill. If he was on the other side of the trigger on this one, he'd have already cleaned his guns and been on his way home.

Alison pointedly ignored him. Around six, her boyfriend, a British producer named Calvin, came over with test remixes of “Victory Song,” the main focus for the virtual-reality segment of the concert. Calvin was a tall, skinny white kid with the look of someone who felt unfairly treated by life. The kind of kid who dismissed others' hard work as luck, and bemoaned the world's indifference to his artistic genius. He wore a slouchy wool hat and a black t-shirt that said “100% original soul brother”, with skinny acid-washed jeans and expensive, faintly ridiculous limited-edition sneakers.

“Whozzat,” he said, jabbing his chin in Bucky's direction.

Alison paused as she slipped on headphones to listen to the new mix. “Ugh. He's awful. New bodyguard. Cadence assigned him.”

“It's the fucking Winter Soldier, innit? That's kind of rad, Ali.”Calvin strutted up to where Bucky was leaning against the wall and looked him up and down. “So you carrying a gun?” Calvin asked him.

“ _A_ gun,” Bucky said, smirking at the innocence of this sweet child who thought he only had one gun on him. Hell, he didn't go to the supermarket with only one gun on him.

“Yeah, cuz I got a piece at home too. You think I can get ten mil an hour? Cuz leaning against a wall don't look that hard, bro.”

Bucky looked over at Alison, _please remove your idiot boyfriend from my general proximity_ , but Alison just tossed her hair and turned her back on him. _I am never taking another protection gig again_ , Bucky thought.

“Yo, bro. I'm talking to you,” Calvin said, poking him in the shoulder.

The part of Bucky's brain that calculated kill matrices and exfil was going overtime supplying creative and painful ways that Calvin could die. It would be so easy to reach out and snap his neck. Bucky shut his eyes for a moment, then opened them, a smile widening across his face. “Calvin. Want to play a game?”

“The fuck? Man, anyone ever tell you that your smile is hella creepy?”

“You want to be an assassin, we'll play a game. It's called Catch the Knife.” Bucky flicked out one of his fighting knives and tossed it in the air. “You catch it before me, you got a shot at what I do.”

“Okay, bitch,” Calvin said, lunging in as the knife fell. Bucky never took his eyes off Calvin, but neatly caught and re-threw the knife, long before Calvin's hand got anywhere near it. Calvin kept trying, but Bucky was far faster than a normal human and even though he wasn't working to his full speed, he still left Calvin shambling in his wake. He brought the knife down and passed it from hand to hand, flipping it and changing grips, always careful to pass it close enough to Calvin that it seemed to anyone watching that Calvin could just reach out and take it.

After a couple minutes, Bucky twirled the knife around the fingers of his metal hand and then sheathed it again with an apologetic shrug. “It's okay, I'm probably terrible at producing music,” he said.

“I almost had that, if you'd carried on a little longer,” griped Calvin.

One of the backup dancers, the one with the pretty burgundy weave, snorted derisively. Bucky winked at her. She was the best dancer, anyway. Calvin whirled and pointed at her. “Shut it, or I'll have Ali fire you.”

Alison looked up from where she was scrolling through her twitter feed. “Nobody's firing anyone. C'mon, Calvin, we're gonna be late for dinner.” Calvin strutted over and laced his fingers in with hers. He looked at her with big, bashful eyes. “Sorry, baby,” he said.

“it's okay,” she smiled up to him. “Weird day. We're all on edge.”

He grinned and kissed her on the cheek. “Yeah. Let's go eat our body weight in sushi.”

Alison bounced to her feet, throwing her bag over her shoulder. “Soosh!”, she squeaked happily.

Bucky pushed off from the wall and grabbed his coat, silently following the giggling young couple into the elevator. Alison startled when she turned around to find him there. “Fuck! Can you go loom somewhere, like, else?”

Bucky rolled his eyes and pushed the elevator button for the parking garage. The plates on his metal arm recalibrated, as they did when he was annoyed, and he could feel Calvin and Alison staring at his arm. Which, sure, everyone always stared, but some days it made him feel more like a freakshow than others. This was one of those days. He began hoping that someone, _anyone_ would make an attempt on Alison's life so he could express the metric fuckton of rage that was filling up inside him in the way that he liked to express it best.

The elevator doors opened and Bucky led the way into the parking garage. Alison started to move away, but Bucky grabbed her arm. “No. We're taking my car,” he said.

“We have a driver and a car,” said Alison. “You can follow.”

“Not for the next seven days,” Bucky said, walking over to his Lamborghini and opening the passenger side door. He saw one of his sniper rifles lying in its case in the front passenger seat, and tossed it into the back. “There's not much of a back seat, but we're not going very far,” he said.

“Why your car?” Alison said, annoyed. She jerked her arm out of his grasp.

“One, it's armoured. Two, it goes faster than the SUV they have you in. Three, I have enough weapons in it to take over a small country.” _Four, I am in an incredibly shitty mood and I need something to make me happy_ , Bucky thought.

Calvin climbed in, his eyes wide. “Suh-weet!” he said. “How fast does this thing go?”

Bucky shrugged. “I've hit 215 in it.”

“Can I drive it someti-”

“No.”

Bucky swung into the driver's seat and started the engine. Alison was in the passenger seat, staring at the assault rifle taped to the ceiling.

Bucky caught her gaze. “People shoot at me a lot,” he explained, pulling out of the garage.

“Um, dude, what do we call you?” said Calvin. Bucky was warming to the kid, he couldn't help himself. He wasn't mean, he was just massively awkward and tried too hard to impress. And he seemed to really care for Alison.

“You can call me James, or Soldier. I answer to both,” he said, flooring it and weaving through traffic. He loved fast driving, especially at night, like this. Sometimes, before he came back to Steve, he'd just get lost, hitting the freeways at night and speeding for hundreds of miles through the darkness, the rhythm of the engine almost a meditation. He missed that. He wasn't sure Steve would understand why he did it. And he was trying, hard as it was, to live by the four little words that Dr Strange's book had suggested to him. But he needed the night, so badly...

“I thought your name was something like Bucky,” said Alison, staring at her phone.

Bucky slid across two lanes of traffic and hung a left on a light that was technically red. “My friends call me Bucky. Like I said, you can call me James, or Soldier.”

“You have a lot of friends?”

“Not really. I have trust issues.”

“Weren't you, like, best buds with Captain America when you were kids?” Alison hadn't looked up from her phone once. He realised she had googled him and was paging through his wikipedia entry. Which was lengthy, and not very accuriate. He plugged his phone into the radio and turned on _MMLP2_ as loud as he could. Eminem could answer for him.

The sushi place wasn't far. He trailed them in, and made them sit at a table not near any windows, in clear view of exits, and close enough to the bar he could watch them and their surroundings easily. Alison let him know through body language and annoyed huffs that his continued presence and interference in her life was unwelcome in the extreme. _Well, you ain't seen nothing yet, kid,_ Bucky thought, drinking a Sapporo at the bar and keeping an eye on them.

Nothing happened. Nothing the least suspicious. Well, other than the tourist who ran up to Alison for an autograph and a selfie and almost died before she got within five feet of the table. Strangers really needed to not run up to people, Bucky thought. Civilians did it to Steve all the time and Bucky had no idea how he coped. Bucky knew that people didn't run up to him because he terrified them, but he was one hundred per cent fine with that.

Shit really hit the fan, though, when they got back to Alison's hotel suite and Bucky explained he was going to stay in the same room as her.

“Absolutely no way!” she yelled.

“It's not negotiable,” Bucky said, arms folded across his chest.

“Because I'm going to feel so safe with you snoring away on my bedroom floor. You can sleep out in the sitting room.”

“I don't sleep.”

“What?”

Bucky rubbed the bridge of his nose and held up his metal hand. “Look. This gets a _lot_ easier if you just think of me as a freakshow, as a monster. I don't need to sleep. I can see in the dark. You don't even want to know what my senses of smell and hearing are like. And I can hold a position for hours without moving. I was Hydra's hunting dog, and for the next seven days I am yours. I am going to sit in a dark corner of your room and when someone comes in to try anything – because if I were sent to kill you, this is when I would do it – I will end them. Otherwise I swear to you, I will make no sound, nor will I move.”

Alison pressed her palms to her forehead. “I _really_ do not want you in my bedroom. You can't do this from the sitting room? Even if I leave the door open?”

“No. I'm not the _only_ monster out there, Alison. Some of them can go invisible, or move even faster than I can.”

“And you think they'll come after me at night?”

“It's the easiest way to do a contract. By the time they find out the target is dead, you're in another country. At my level, though, they usually hire you to make a statement. Crash the plane; poison them in the middle of the charity ball--”

“--shoot them during the motorcade through Dallas.”

“Yeah.”

She sighed and tapped away on her phone, sending a text. A few moments later, she got a reply, which didn't please her very much. She pressed her lips together and threw the phone onto her bed.

Bucky raised his eyebrows.

“I got a second opinion. He said what you wanted to do was legit.”

“Wolverine?” Bucky guessed.

“Yeah.”

Bucky smiled as he settled down on part of the floor that allowed him an unrestricted view to the exit, the windows, and Alison. “Logan knows what's what.” He crossed his legs and settled into a position that was an acceptable compromise between being comfortable and being fast to move out from.

“He also said if you did anything creepy, he'd come after you,” Alison warned, heading to the bathroom with her nightclothes.

“Don't worry. I'm taken. Very taken,” Bucky said.

Alison changed into pyjamas and watched TV for half the night, surfing around from movie to movie. She'd glance over at Bucky often, gradually understanding that when he meant he didn't move, he really _did not move at all_ and it was _beyond_ creepy.

After a while she forgot he was there, and she spaced out to the TV flickering in the darkness. A musical came on TCM and she lay back, orchestrating a little light show over her head as she hummed the old, familiar songs to herself. Long borealises of emerald and, later, cobalt filled the top part of the room, trailing off into glittery sparkles as they wound down towards the floor. Then the air filled with a sort of phosphoresence, that Alison trailed her hands through as if it was water to make it ripple outwards in circles and waves. It was indescribably beautiful, and Bucky's face felt wet, but he said he wouldn't move so he let the tears dry on his cheeks on their own.

Alison finally went to sleep around 2am. There was no attempt on her life that night.

The next morning, there was a big press conference planned with Cadence Media, the VR company, to launch the concert and the goggles they were giving away in conjunction with it. The whole thing was some big marketing deal, where people got free VR headsets and then Alison did a special live light show and performance of a particular song that everyone got to download free onto the headsets after the concert was over.

Bucky waited to get up from her room until she had woken up and seen him, and then he just rose and nodded at her and left as she headed into the bathroom for a shower. He was stiff from holding position for so long, not to mention running on a serious energy deficit so after scarfing down a couple of Bruce's nutrient gel packs (food was a boring, pointless waste of time), he started to stretch out and work his body back into the looseness it needed to be effective.

Alison came out of the bathroom, dressed and ready to go in a flashy green leather and fur jacket and sequined jeans, base makeup on and hair set for the press conference.

When she came into the sitting room, Bucky was in the middle of a diffcult inversion sequence and she stared at him impatiently and tapped her foot while he finished it. He did a backflip up to standing and then shoved his feet back into his combat boots. “Almost ready,” he said, stashing the guns and knives he'd laid out on the coffee table back in their various holsters and sheaths on his body. He tucked a last knife into a boot, and then slid a jacket on that would hide both his metal arm and the hard, aggressive shape of his body. A battered old baseball cap covered his face enough so by the time he was done, he looked like any other anonymous (but fit) music industry guy.

He pulled out his phone and sent a quick text as they headed to the elevators.

 

JBB: Miss you so bad. Contract is boring / annoying.

SGR: Miss you too. Phone sex?

JBB: Can't. Close protection work = zero privacy.

SGR: That's a shame.

Attached to that message was a slightly blurry selfie of Steve, naked in front of a mirror, with a hard-on.

JBB: NOT HELPING, ROGERS

JBB: Gonna block your number now and when I get home I'm going to throw you over my knee. And then over every piece of furniture in the apartment.

SGR: ...Promise?

 

Bucky grinned and made a small sound that was half-laugh, half-growl as he turned his phone off.

“Your girl?” Alison asked.

“My guy.”

“Oh.” Alison looked at him, the little shy private smile, the blush, the way he'd ducked his head. “Wow, you've really got it bad.”

“Yeah,” the assassin said quietly, still blushing. “It's so much. Sometimes I feel like I'm going to break apart from it.”

Alison looked away. This guy was the most exasperating person she ever met. Just when she had him figured out as this scary, inhuman killer, he goes and does something _cute_. And those handstand yoga pose things he was doing when she walked in had been... kind of disturbingly hot.

She almost felt bad that she was going to ask the Cadence execs at the press conference to get rid of him. Everyone was over-reacting to this death threat business, and James' paranoia was seriously cramping her style. One day was... interesting, but a whole week of this? Oh _hell_ no. Besides, how was she supposed to have Calvin over, with crazy-eyes guard dog camped out on her floor?

She slipped backstage to the green room with Bucky as her silent shadow. Priya, her makeup artist, was waiting for her and she gave her a kiss and a hug and sat down to have her face made perfect. As Priya was putting on her eyelash extensions, she whispered, “who's the new guy in the hat?”

“Ugh. New bodyguard. Not working out, though. About to be ex-bodyguard.”

“He's _hot_ , Alison.”

“No. Absolutely no. He's scary and paranoid and _bye_. Besides, Priya, I'm _me_. I don't need a babysitter. It's _demeaning_ \--”

“Hey, no moving, unless you want messy eyelashes.”

“Sorry.”

The Cadence gang came over to say hi, and she watched James tense and move a hand under his jacket. The two Tykkio brothers were over from Finland with Williams from her label escorting them and she smiled and did the Grateful Star thing and made all the right noises about how delighted she was with the opportunity and how VR was the future and blah, blah, blah. She knew her cheeks were going to ache from smiling by the end of the press conference, the makeup heavy on her face, hair stiff with spray, in clothes and high platform heels that imprisoned her in a straightjacket of _stand there, look pretty_. Be their fantasy. Be their doll. Be the one they tweet rape “jokes” to because you're wearing too few clothes, or call ugly because you're wearing too many clothes. Be the one they call angry for being black and not taking their shit. Be the one that's not black enough because you were working all day and didn't jump on some social media bandwagon cause. Be their icon. Be their punching bag.

As the older Tykkio brother (Waldemar? She couldn't remember), turned to go, she put a hand on his arm and pulled him close. “Hey, I wanted to say thanks for arranging the additional security. It was very considerate. But... he has to go. He's not working out.”

Waldemar's pale eyes widened. “There has been a problem?”

“No. He hasn't done anything wrong. But I don't like him. His presence upsets me and I don't want him around. I appreciate your concern, but I am very good at taking care of myself.”

“You won't reconsider? There have been very credible threats against your life, Miss Blaire.”

“It's either him or me, Waldemar. I mean it. Take your pick.”

The skinny old Scandinavian guy patted her knee and said, “Okay, then, Miss Blaire. We'll take care of it after the press conference. We only want your happiness.” _Yeah and I only want your hand off my knee, you scabby old man._

Priya pronounced her done, and took an Insta for her to see and approve before uploading it. She loved the look: gold highlights on her cheeks and a rich plum lipstick that set off her green eyes. And lashes for miles. “Knock 'em dead,” Priya whispered as she got up.

Alison air-kissed her. “Thanks.”

Williams scuttled over, saying it was time. Deep breath. Put on the smile. She glanced over at James, who was standing nearby, staring at her. Had he heard her conversation with the guy from Cadence? Well, whatever. His feelings weren't her problem.

Then she was walking out on stage, her arm on Waldemar Tykkio's, smiling and waving for the flashbulbs. They'd demo the headsets, she'd maybe do a short a capella thing, say a few words, and then six hours in hotel rooms of answering the same idiot questions from different journalists until it got to the point she'd forget mid-sentence not only who she was talking to, but what question she was answering. The room was packed, at least, and she knew it was the biggest room the hotel had. Not that she could see past the stage lights but it _looked_ packed.

The screen behind was showing clips from her latest video on mute and the Tykkio twins were doing their intro thing about the future of music and VR when--

 

somebody screamed

 

something hit her

 

gunshots crackled through the room

 

and she realised the thing that hit her was James and he was standing in front of her and blocking bullets with his metal arm and firing back with a pistol in his other hand--

 

lots more people screamed and chairs screeched and fell over--

and he scooped her up with his flesh arm and opened his metal hand and three bullets fell out _and he had caught them_ and he said to her “watch out, first one's down but he won't be the only shooter” and everyone was running everywhere and he was half-walking, half-carrying her to the wings and then there was a flicker of shadow at the edge of the stage and a hand came out with a pistol pointed at her but James was faster on the draw and there were two more gunshots and James said “shit”, and she managed to say “what” and he indicated the dead shooter's hand as they ran past, there was a tattoo, and he said “Clan Nefaria. The Maggia. Super-powered mob,” and he was steering her to a service exit and he said “They run three-person strike teams with a getaway driver. Two down, two to go” and then they were outside in a dead-end alley behind the hotel and he let go of her and _threw a dumpster_ in front of the door they'd just came through to block it, like who just picks up a dumpster--

“Injured?” he said, looking her over.

She shook her head. She was in shock and she knew it; she'd been this way once before when she'd gotten in a bad car accident.

“Okay,” he said, reaching out to her again. “We have to keep moving. We can't stay--

The loud buzz of a motorbike drowned the rest of his words and Alison screamed as a biker in white leather appeared at the end of the alley, an assault rifle in one hand. James shoved her towards the dumpster and said “get behind it” and as he turned his eyes flicked upwards. He threw something with his metal arm, the movement snake-strike fast, a blur. Alison followed the direction of the throw with her eyes, looking up to the roofline to see the silhouette of the third shooter as he caught a throwing knife in the neck. The shooter began to tumble off the edge towards them, his gun spattering useless rounds into the brick walls above her head. She hunkered down next to the dumpster – green, it at least matched her outfit, she thought sarcastically.

James was squaring off with the biker like it was High Noon. The biker revved his engine and accelerated towards James, firing the assault rifle and James did the last thing Alison would have expected: he ran straight at the biker, jumping and twisting through the air as he dodged the line of automatic-rifle fire and Alison could tell that even the biker was like _WTF_ and then James had somersaulted over the front of the bike and wrapped his legs around the biker's throat and Alison could hear the snap of his neck breaking even over the bike engine and James managed to throw the dead guy's body off the bike with his thighs while the bike was a) still moving and b) he was still balanced with one hand on the handlebars and then he twists, lands perfectly on the seat, and skids the bike to a halt right next to the dumpster.

“Alison. Take the helmet. Put it on.”

She tottered over on her Rick Owens boots and tugged the helmet off the dead biker, who was lying on the ground at all sorts of wrong angles. When she came back, James had put on goggles and a mask over the lower half of his face. The effect was terrifying, and she remembered the news photos of him from DC, and from when all that information had come out about him a few months ago. She shivered, involuntarily.

He grabbed her arm and maneouvered her forwards when she made to get on the bike behind him. “No. In front of me. I'm supposed to be protecting you, remember?” he growled.

She wedged herself in front of him, and he guided her hands to the handlebars and her legs to where they could rest on his. “All set?” he asked.

Her mind was replaying the last, God, it had been maybe what, five minutes of her life? From James catching bullets to breaking people's necks in mid-air with his thighs. Before she could think it through, she found herself blurting out, “You're... you're not anywhere near human, are you?”

“No,” he said. “Not anymore.”

She sighed, and shivered again, coming down off the shock. James revved the bike and turned it around. “Where are we going?” she asked, her voice small as they took off out of the alley.

“We're getting the hell out of Mobtown.”

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter title song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uhG-vLZrb-g oh look, a stucky fic named after a Fall Out Boy song.
> 
> For those of you who aren't addicted to US pop music charts, the phrase "Number One With A Bullet" describes a song / a single that has entered the chart directly at number one, rather than entering lower down and rising to #1: http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Number+One+With+A+Bullet
> 
> Note: in honour of Dazzler's original intended origin, to be based on Grace Jones (she was later based on Bo Derek instead, why Marvel whyyyyy), I've made my Alison into a Black American of Jamaican origin. She doesn't slip into patois much, unless she's angry. 
> 
> This story takes place a couple months after the events of The Murder Ballads, but you don't really need to read that series to get this. And, um, I know literally _nobody_ asked for a Bucky/Dazzler action-thriller but *don't care, doing it anyway*
> 
> I am TERRIBLE at tags so if you think of ones that should be on here, please suggest them in the comments.


	2. This Isn't Farmlife

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The Mob comes for Bucky and Alison, in the American heartland, where there is nowhere to hide.

Bucky and Alison raced the bike for a little over an hour, heading south and west out of Chicago into the endless cornfields of the American heartland. Alison thought Bucky might have kept on going, but for the cop who pulled out from behind a billboard and flashed his lights, warning them he was going to pull them over for speeding. She could feel Bucky tense around her, and she tapped his arm to tell him to pull over – the last thing she needed was trouble with the law, getting her mug shot all over TMZ.

He pulled off the side of the two-lane highway, at the entrance to a dirt farm road. Alison freed her head of the confines of the helmet and took a deep breath, hoping her hair wasn't too terrible. She noticed Bucky had stripped off his mask, and pushed his goggles up into his hair so he looked less scary. He still had on his jacket, so the metal arm wasn't obvious. Maybe they could get through this without disaster, Alison thought.

And then she remembered they were riding a stolen bike.

She dismounted from the bike and turned to head over to where the police car was just pulling up.

Bucky circled her arm with his hand and narrowed his eyes. “What are you doing?”

She smiled at him. “You do your thing, now watch me do mine.” She shook her arm free of his hand and set off towards the police car, putting a little wiggle into her walk and she was feeling pretty damn fine and successful at her exit until her heel sunk down into the dirt of the road and her ankle wobbled inwards. “Dammit,” she swore under her breath as she righted herself, put on her Gracious Smile and continued towards the cop. He was a middle-aged white guy. _Please have daughters_ , she thought. _Please have teenage daughters._

“Goin' mighty fast there, young lady,” the cop said. Then he did a double-take. “Say, aren't you that singer?”

“Why yes, sir. I'm Dazzler, nice to meet you.” She stuck out her hand and the cop reached out his window to take it. Once he did, she pressed the back of his hand with her thumb and batted her eyelashes (which hopefully were still on and not knocked everywhere by that damn helmet). “Um, my friend was teaching me to ride a motorcycle.” She glanced over at Bucky, praying he wasn't doing anything scary, but he was just leaning against the bike with his baseball cap on and pulled a little low over his face. He saw her and smiled an actual normal person friendly smile and gave a little wave back. Like he totally hadn't picked up and thrown a dumpster earlier.

She looked back at the policeman, bending down, intimate. He was ugly, about 20 pounds overweight with pockmarked skin and reddish hair cut so short she could see his flaky scalp through it. “I need to ride it in my next music video, and we came out here because it's less scary to ride than in the city. I'm so, so sorry I was speeding. I'm still not very good at driving the bike.”

“Is that your bike, ma'am?” he said.

Shit, Alison thought. He already called in the plate.

“No, sir, it belongs to the music video production company. Or they rented it from someone they know. I'm not sure. They loaned it to me for a week so I could get used to driving it.”

“Well, you looked like you were doing okay, but Miss Dazzler, you need to obey the speed limit. I'm just giving you a warning this time--”

“Oh, thank you so much,” she said.

“--and, um, would you mind signing something for my daughter, Braylee? She's a big fan.”

“I'd be happy to! Do you have a photo of her? I always love seeing my fans.”

Alison spent a good ten minutes with the cop, looking at photos of his daughter, in her prom dress, in her high school graduation gown, at cheer practice, you name it, and writing a little note to Braylee, “B-R-A-Y-L-E-E, right?” on the back of a witness statement sheet. She gave the cop a nice wave goodbye, stumbled in the dirt again, and walked back to Bucky.

They both smiled and waved as the cop pulled off, and then Alison turned and rolled her eyes. “Uuugh,” she groaned.

“I'm impressed,” Bucky said. “How are you holding up? After getting shot at, I mean.”

Alison hugged her arms to herself and kicked the dirt. “I'm okay, I guess. Where the hell are we? Like, why are we in a cornfield?”

Bucky hummed and looked out across the corn. “There's an intelligence principle called 'getting black',” he said.

Alison raised an eyebrow. “Uh-huh,” she said.

“...It means to disappear. Fall off the radar. Lose your surveillance. When things go bad, it's the first thing you do. By myself, I can get black in a city very easily. Almost instantly. But with an internationally-famous pop star in a bright green fur jacket? More difficult.” Bucky exhaled. “It doesn't help that Family Nefaria run the Chicago mob, and the Chicago mob pretty much runs Chicago. They have eyes everywhere. Except out here,” he gestured at the emptiness around them. “where there is nothing to see. I got us to a place we could think, and plan. That's all.”

“Okay,” she said.

“Now,” he said, folding his arms and looking into her eyes, “Want to tell me what you've done to piss off the mob?”

“Can we have this conversation somewhere that has a bathroom and a supply of diet coke?” she said. “I mean, the short answer is nothing, but it's windy and dirty out here and I think I might have stepped in cow poop.”

But Bucky was staring up into the sky, not listening to a word she was saying.

“What is it?” Alison asked.

“Airplane,” he said. “Single-engine prop plane. Maybe a cropduster.”

“Is this the time of year people dust crops?”

“Beats the hell out of me,” Bucky grumbled. “I'm from Brooklyn.” He looked around. Nothing for miles but cornfields and the odd telephone pole. No shelter, no way of concealing their presence. And the corn was young, just over knee high. Not tall enough to hide in.

Hell, maybe this was the time of year crops got dusted. Maybe for once in his godforsaken life he'd get lucky.

The airplane swooped low out of the sky, barrelling down the two-lane road. Bucky saw the machine-gun muzzles mounted below the propellor.

Or maybe someone on the police force tipped off the mob about the bike. And maybe Family Nefaria's reach was wider than just Metro Chicago.

Bucky pushed Alison towards the bike. “Get behind it! Hunker down low,” he said, moving in front of the bike as the twin lines of machine-gun fire strafed pavement and then dirt, speeding towards him. He drew his 9s and twisted at the last moment, letting the bullets pass either side of him, and unloaded both clips into the belly of the plane.

It had zero effect. The plane rose into the sun and banked around for another pass.

“I don't have anything big enough to bring that plane down,” Bucky said, as Alison shivered in terror behind the bike. The bike was half-destroyed, a tire torn up and the gas tank perforated. Alison couldn't stay behind it. One spark... and then Bucky's eyes widened. He _did_ have something big enough to bring the plane down. Not the 40mm grenade he'd been thinking of, but...

Alison saw Bucky's face. “What are you going to do?”

“Somethin' stupid,” he said, setting his stance, ready for the plane's next strafing run. _Here it comes_ , he thought, as the plane howled over the two-lane blacktop towards them. The pilot had learned from his first run and was waggling the wings, scattering bullets in less predictable lines. Bucky turned to the side to block as many bullets as he could with his arm. This was going to hurt.

“James, tell me what your plan is! I can help!”

“I'm going to throw the bike at the plane. There's nothing you can do. I work alone.”

The lines of heavy-calibre bullets were ten feet away, spanging off the asphalt of the road, and approaching fast. The plane was so close and so low they could see the pilot, a thin, hungry-looking white guy with a scar across his lip.

“How can you block bullets and throw the bike at the same time? Or are you just okay with getting shot?” Alison asked. Then, when it was clear she wasn't going to get an answer, she shot an annoyed “ugh!” at the broad back of _seriously_ , the most pigheaded and annoying man in the entire universe. She'd show him.

Alison concentrated on the roar of the propeller, took the violent, throbbing sound into her, and transformed it. She pointed her right hand straight at the pilot, and a blast of white-blue light shot out from it straight into his face. The pilot screamed and took his hands off the stick for a moment to shade his eyes from the blinding glare, briefly causing the machine-gun fire to stop.

Bucky saw his moment and grabbed the motorcycle. He braced, muscles bunched and straining, and _flung_ the bike into the air. It spun 20 feet and smashed into the plane's propeller, destroying it, before tumbling straight towards the cockpit. The plane tilted alarmingly and a wing hit the asphalt, splintering and sparking.

Alison folded her arms, rolled her eyes and said under her breath, “Oh yeah, lookit me, I'm the Winter Soldier, I'd rather get shot than ask for help, I love Nine Inch Nails and being a moody jackass.”

Then Bucky was turning towards her with his eyes wide and Alison briefly thought _oh shit, he heard that_ , but then she looked up over his shoulder and the plane was exploding, on fire, and somersaulting towards them over its broken, trailing wing. Bucky tackled her into the dirt as far as he could away from the impending crash. He threw his body over her, covering both their heads with his metal arm. Something slammed into them, some part of the plane, she didn't know what, but Bucky didn't make a sound. Then, about 30 feet beyond them, the plane hit ground and exploded in a screeching crash of tortured metal and flame.

Bucky uncurled from around her and stood up, offering a hand to help her up.

She stood, shakily, and gave him a smile. His face was covered in soot from the explosion. She didn't even want to imagine what hers looked like. “Gotta say,” she said, “you throwing stupidly heavy things never stops being impressive.”

He smiled back, looking down at his boots. “The light thing... that was really impressive too. Thanks. And, um...” he shifted awkwardly. “I actually don't like Nine Inch Nails.”

Alison blushed. Then Bucky turned to look at the plane wreckage and she noticed the huge, nasty red gash down his back. “Hey! You're hurt,” she said.

“It's shallow. Looks worse than it is,” he said, remarkably apathetically for someone whose jacket was starting to soak with blood.

They both stood there, tired and dirty and beat up, watching the fire consume the plane. Alison realised it wasn't even noon yet. She sighed. “So, uh, since you chucked our ride at the plane... I don't suppose calling an Uber is an option?”

Bucky snickered. “No. I'm afraid not.”

“But this is the part where you tell me we're going to hole up at a nice farmhouse until someone from the label can drive out and get us, right?” she said, hopefully.

He shook his head. “Family Nefaria won't stop. They know where we are. Any place we go, we'd be putting the owners' lives at risk. We're going to walk until we can find a car to steal, or until they come after us again.”

Alison tottered over to the asphalt, sat down, and pulled her high-heeled boots off. She stood up in her stocking feet, and tossed her hair. “Which way?”

Bucky pointed further down the road. “There's a town about six miles south.”

She fixed him with a glare, then started walking. “If someone takes a photo and I end up on TMZ looking like a crazy hobo lady, you owe me a whole new outfit. And I know you're good for it, mister I-never-fail.”

Bucky laughed as he caught up with her. “You actually still look great. An angel with a dirty face. And,” he said, looking down, “some stylish Wonder Woman socks.”

“Do not disrespect my lucky socks, James.”

“Call me Bucky,” he smiled.

They headed towards the town in a companionable silence. They had been walking an hour and were probably only a mile or two out from it when, out of the heat haze that shimmered on the horizon, emerged three black cars: two SUVs with tinted windows, and a long black sedan.

Bucky sighed.

“That for us?” Alison asked.

“Almost certainly,” Bucky said, stepping into the middle of the road and pulling his goggles down over his eyes.

“You got a plan?”

“I'm good at destroying cars. Thought I'd just wing it.”

“Okay. Then whichever car you're not actively destroying, I'll try to crash it.”

“Deal, but stay behind me.” He flashed a grin, then raised his mask to his face and attached it. “And don't get shot.”

“You neither, jackass.”

Bucky drew one of his reloaded 9s with his right hand and dropped his weight slightly into a fighting crouch. Here we go, he thought, as the two SUVs fanned out across the road with the sedan in the rear. He glanced back at Alison and indicated she should take the left-hand car. She nodded.

Then he ran, straight for the right-hand car and he could see their smart suits and red shirts and worried faces through the windshield as he moved towards them at a speed they hadn't considered possible and then up--

\--flip over the hood and turn and fire at the driver and shotgun but shit the windshield glass is bulletproof then grab the roof and land, bright light to his right as Alison flashes the other car and they're already weaving so shoot out their tyres and then SUV #1 is off the road and rolling into a cornfield the guys in his car are trying to fire upwards roll off and he smashes through the driver's side window it may be bulletproof but it ain't shit against a metal arm and a bad attitude yank the driver out and throw him headfirst into the pavement and there's someone in the back seat in armour and a strange helmet and SHIT fucking plasma blast or something _hanging off a speeding car one-handed isn't a good look Barnes_ fuck then the sedan speeds by towards Alison and you need to clear this up and clear it up now Soldier so he tosses a grenade in through the open window fire in the hole and jump off the car roll and use the arm to slow you down and three two one SUV #2 goes up but to _hell with my luck_ the asshole with the armor and the forehead-canon walks out of the smoke and where's Alison, the third car is parked and the strike team is getting out and he fires and takes down two and then he sees a green streak flash out from where SUV #1 was upside down in the dirt and it's this lizard thing half man half crocodile and it's charging him and his bullets are bouncing off the hard scales on its head and arms--

\--And Christ enhancement programmes had gotten fucking stupid since him, he had a lot of feelings about Zola but at least Zola didn't turn him into a fucking _crocodile_ apparently there _is_ such a thing as small mercies at Hydra. The unicorn guy with the forehead cannon was on the other side, circling him warily _always nice when my reputation precedes me_ and the guy looks wired as hell, wonder how many drugs they have him on to make his body deal with whatever probably radioactive shit they've stuck in it and then a black tide of rage rises up in him because it's always the fucking _same_ , the scientists never get it right, never since Stevie, just taking bad people and breaking and reforming them into something worse and then keeping them doped to the fucking gills for the pain and the sickness and the screaming in their heads and he knew that these two assholes probably walked in willingly, sat down on the lab table and begged, _make me like the Avengers_ , and the scientists just smile and say _we'll do our best_ \-- and this is why he had hoped to stay a ghost because he never wanted anyone to say _make me like the Winter Soldier_ but Hydra couldn't even let him have that--

The man-crocodile's mouth smashes around his left arm and Bucky feels the croc's tail lash around his leg and pull and they're both going down and the guy has claws on his feet and hands and his front claws are digging at Bucky's right arm and his chest and his rear claws are trying to embed into Bucky's thighs. That mouth is opening again and Bucky can hear the unicorn guy begging in the background, “Charlie, lemme have a shot I gotta take a shot my head is killin' me just lemme get him--” and Croc guy opens his mouth to say “Back off, Ernie--” and that's when he gets a fighting knife up through the roof of his mouth into his brain and the jaws clamp and unclamp in death throes on Bucky's metal arm and he throws the body towards the unicorn guy as he rolls to his feet and as he charges unicorn guy his brain notices that the guy is crying blood and has a fixed grin on his face and is saying _yesyesyes_ and the thing about big cannon weapons like that is they're deadly at a middle distance but absolutely useless close-up and Bucky slams his left shoulder into the guy and he can hear the blasts going over head and one actually burns across his back and then Bucky's knocked him over and has his jaw in his right hand and is tearing off all the armour and wiring with his left he's going to shut the cannon down or shut the person down whichever comes first and the suit he's wearing has some robotics in it and it makes him _strong_ and it's taking nearly all his power to keep this guy down.

And the guy looks at him with his bloody eyes and hisses through the hand that Bucky has clenched on his jaw and says _you're even better than they said you were_ and then he says _you're my hero_ and Bucky isn't tearing at the armour any more he's just slamming his metal fist down into it over and over, into the guy's chest, and power conduits and metal plate and bone and cartilage and lung all turn into a splintered mess and the cannon shorts out and the bloody tears stop and the head rolls to the side, limp. Then Bucky pushes himself to his feet and it takes every moment of his years as the Soldier to push down the nausea washing over him, to not shake to pieces the way he wants to. He will continue with the mission. He will process this later, in the still of the night, when nobody is awake to see him. The mission--

Where's Alison--

The sedan blasts past him and hard ingrained training has him shooting out the back tyres to slow it down even as he is sprinting to catch up with it and he leaps onto the trunk and he can see through the rear window that Alison is lying in the back seat knocked out. He is 110% done with subtlety for today so he just rips the entire roof off and growls “stop the car” and a Family Nefaria mook reaches into in his sharp black suit for his piece and starts to open his mouth, but before he can say whatever bullshit threat he was thinking of Bucky's already shot him and that actually makes the driver stop the car pretty quick. The driver has a black eye and the guy Bucky shot had a split lip so _good going, Alison_ , he thinks as he reaches down and picks her up in his arms.

He looks down at the driver. “Tell the rest of Family Nefaria to back off. Dazzler is under my protection. Try anything again and I will hunt every last member of Nefaria down for sport.” He turns and jumps down off the car and walks off towards the one vehicle that remains driveable, which is the currently upside down SUV because apparently today nothing can be easy. The driver of the former sedan now a convertible of sorts takes off as fast as he can down the road, the back wheel rims sparking as they saw into the asphalt.

Bucky lays Alison down carefully, cutting her bonds. Then he made sure the rest of the strike team in SUV #1 are dead before pulling their bodies out and lifting the SUV back onto its tyres. He wanted to get Alison in the SUV and away from the scene before she woke up and could see the... _his_ carnage.

_You could just not kill people._

_That would be inefficient and stupid._

But he had two tyres to change because there really was no end to how much today sucked. He did it quickly and then tucked his mask and goggles away because she didn't need to wake up to _that_.

Alison woke up in the back seat just as he was pulling away from the scene, heading back towards Chicago. She screamed and sat up and threw a punch at Bucky and he caught her hand and said “ssh, it's me, you're safe.” Alison just blinked at him for a moment and then started crying. Great big sobs rocked through her, tears making streaks of cleanliness on her dirty cheeks.

“I-I'm sorry,” she sobbed, “using light blasts like that wipes me out, and- and-” she stuttered.

“-you were scared,” Bucky finished.

“You probably think I'm a wimp.”

“Nah,” he smiled. “I saw that shiner you laid on that Nefaria mook. C'mere.” Bucky tugged on her arm and she looked at him, wary. Then she climbed through into the front passenger seat and wiped at her face. Bucky rubbed her back with his right hand, small circles, trying to warm her up.

“Why is this happening? Why would anyone call out the mob on me?” She started sobbing again. “Why can't I just make music without people thinking I'm an _acceptable target_?”

“I dunno. But I'm going to find out, Alison.” He squeezed her shoulder. “You rest now. It's been a shitty day.”

“Oh yes it has,” she agreed. Then she looked at him, eyes narrowed. “Still wondering when _you_ rest.”

He shrugged. “When it's over.” His air of nonchalance was severely undermined by his stomach deciding to grumble right then. Alison giggled. He tapped the fingers of his metal hand on the steering wheel as he told her the plan: “We'll change hotels, have showers, get room service and eat half the menu. Sound good?”

Alison snuggled into the corner of her seat. “Can't. I have a date with Calvin tonight.”

“Oh. Okay,” Bucky said.

It was probably best he didn't have solid food. The gel packs and the shots worked better anyway, in terms of staying at peak efficiency.

Alison slept the rest of the way back. At a streetlight in the outskirts of Chicago, Bucky pulled out his phone.

 

JBB: I love you

SGR: ?? are you ok

JBB: Yeah. Today was bad.

JBB: In other news I threw a bike at an airplane

JBB: So I guess I can't make fun of you any more for throwing one at a tank

Steve's next message was an image of Rapunzel from _Tangled_ holding her frying pan

SGR: Who knew, right?

JBB: snort

SGR: I love you too

SGR: By the way I know you're protecting Dazzler. There was a clip of the shooting on TV.

JBB: She's all right, actually

JBB: But the situation's really fucked. Something's wrong, Steve.

JBB: I gotta go

SGR: Buck, wait

SGR: BUCKY

SGR: TALK TO ME

JBB: When I know something I will

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter title song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hI2VSYVK4UU
> 
> As always, your comments give me life.


	3. Fame

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The video of Dazzler's shooting goes viral, and Bucky's head goes into a tailspin.

Bucky and Alison limped back into Chicago around sunset. Alison slept the entire way back, until Bucky woke her in the hotel car park and bundled her into an old black hoodie of his so nobody would recognise her in the elevator. Alison was tiny, barely 5'5” and she curled up half-under his jacket as they rode up to their floor. It couldn't have been very pleasant; he knew he smelled like gunsmoke and steel and other people's blood.

“You sure you want to go out tonight?” he said to her, noting her exhaustion, the residual tangle of fear in her eyes.

Alison nodded, her face against his tac jacket. “Have to. All the entertainment press got called out for photos of Calvin and me. And I need to show the fans I'm okay after this morning.”

“You don't owe them anything.”

Alison looked up, the hood falling back from her face, and she narrowed her eyes. “I owe them _everything_.”

They reached their floor and Bucky gently disengaged himself from Alison and stepped in front of her, hands hovering over the guns at his thighs. The elevator door opened to an empty hallway, and Bucky swiftly led her to their room. They were moving hotels tonight; they couldn't stay here, where the Maggia had tried to assassinate Alison.

Alison trailed behind and tried not to be freaked out by the pink, already healing skin closing over the ugly cut on his back. Once they got to their room and Bucky had swept it for... whatever, he finally relaxed somewhat. He threw off some of his layers in the sitting room. She showered first (Bucky said he was going to take a while in the bathroom, something about needing _maintenance_ , whatever the hell that meant.) When she came out and glanced into the sitting-room area of the suite, he was cleaning weapons. “Your turn,” she called.

He nodded and vanished into the bathroom.

She took her time picking out something simple for her date with Calvin. She had been planning to go 1000% designer fabulousness tonight, a gold Balmain jumpsuit, but that now felt too flashy for her first appearance post an assassination attempt. Instead: a basic black Dolce & Gabbana dress, black patent flats, and her hair up in a chignon. It made her look even younger than her 24 years and she fought the urge to take it all off and throw on something else that was less clean-cut Disney-star.

At that moment Bucky came out, already in skinny jeans and a slim blue-grey v-neck tee that made his blue eyes look even more surreal in their paleness. He glanced over at her. “Nice. Audrey Hepburn,” he said with a little smile, and disappeared back into the sitting room.

Alison decided her outfit was fine.

She packed; Bucky layered weapons and protective clothing on himself. The blue t-shirt disappeared under a tac vest, then a slim hoodie, then a peacoat long enough to hide the guns holstered low on his hips.

They hauled her suitcases and his bags of kit downstairs to the hotel parking garage, and Alison practically ran to Bucky's car. He stopped her before she opened the door. “What?” she said.

He held up a finger, signalling her to wait, then got down on his back and looked under the vehicle. “Yeah. Car bomb,” he said. “I have to defuse it. Can you throw a little light down here?”

Alison frowned. “I need sound, music preferably, to convert into light. There's, uh, no sound in the parking garage.”

“Oh,” Bucky said from under the car. “Does it have to be on-key sound?”

“It helps,” Alison snapped. She _was_ exhausted and frankly today had already involved attempted death by gun, car and aeroplane, and now, _great_ , they can add bomb to the list.

Then a rough baritone was singing the blues. It was shaky, but... not bad. _I went down to St James' Infirmary, saw my baby there..._

Alison giggled and the singing stopped. “That bad?” Bucky asked.

“No! I mean, don't quit the day job, but... you have a good voice for the blues.”

“I have a _ruined_ voice.”

“Keep singing, and you'll have your lights,” she said, starting to clap a simple 4/4 rhythm, and after a moment, Bucky started up again.

_She was stretched out on a long, white table, so cold, so sweet, so fair_

Alison concentrated, and small white lights appeared under the low car, making the dark space seem warm and inviting.

_Let her go, let her go, god bless her, wherever she may be_

A klunk, then a squat bit of shaped metal slid out from under the car.

_She can look the whole world over, but she'll never find a sweet man like me_

The lights wavered a bit as Bucky stopped singing. “There's probably a secondary bomb- yeah, here it is. Hang on. You have to suffer through a couple more verses.”

But Alison had found the lyrics on her phone and surprised him by joining in on the next verse, still clapping the rhythm.

The back-up explosive shared the fate of the main one, shoved out from under the car twisted and inert. Soon after, they were on their way to the new hotel where, Bucky promised, not only would their suite be bigger, it had a bright yellow piano in it.

While they were in traffic, Bucky asked, “Have you ever tried to work backwards with your powers? Turn light into music? Or... taking light away, back into yourself? Plunging everything into darkness?”

Alison shook her head. “No.”

“What about bending light, creating illusions, making things seem like they're not there?”

“Still no.” She traced her finger against the window, looking out at Chicago commuters streaming down the sidewalks of Michigan Ave, at the architecture: the oddly gothic bumping shoulders with stark modernity. “My career stands or falls on decisions like whether my next single has a good enough pre-chorus hook. I mean, my light talents are great. I'm proud to be a mutant and everything but I don't spend a ton of time thinking about how better to _weaponize_ my powers.”

Bucky shrugged, then swung right along the river. “That's all I think about.” He tapped his metal fingers on the steering wheel. “Part of my brain, about a third of it, is like a fight computer... it runs all the time. It's how I knew there was a car bomb, because I looked at _my own car_ and my brain immediately supplied eight ways I could assassinate the people riding in it, and then a dozen ways to get out to the street unseen.” Then he grinned at her. “But not to worry. The other third to half of my brain is my charming personality.”

Alison groaned and rolled her eyes, as expected, but then she added: “Your arithmetic sucks, by the way.”

“My arithmetic is great.”

“Nah. Fight computer, 33%. Person, 33-50%. What's the rest? I still think it's Nine Inch Nails lyrics.”

Bucky chewed on his lip for a moment, then spoke quietly as they pulled up to the Langham's entranceway. “The rest is the part that kept me alive through Hydra. I don't let it out to play very much.” He killed the engine and stepped out of the car, deftly changing the subject before Alison could pry for more details. Instead of saying _part of me is a screaming void full of broken glass_ or _even at the best of times I'm barely half a person; at the worst I am a monster attached to a fight computer_ or _I have a knot of black insanity in me and I keep it warm and dry and safe because I owe it my life many times over_ he took her arm and winked and said, “Let's go see this yellow piano.”

 

* * *

 

They picked up Calvin a little before eight and drove to the restaurant, a trendy place in Lincoln Park with a crowd of people outside. People with _cameras_. And _microphones_. “Those for you?” Bucky asked, his voice thick with displeasure.

“Yeah,” Alison said.

Bucky snorted and parked the car. When Alison looked over at him again his hood was up over his face, and he was wearing his mask and goggles. She raised an eyebrow. “Really?” she said.

“Really,” Bucky replied.

“You're going to scare people in the restaurant.”

“I don't care.”

Bucky stepped out of the car and around to open Alison's door. The journalists immediately surged forwards, shouting, camera flashes going off. Even though Bucky knew that these weren't muzzle flashes, that cameras were harmless, he felt wired with adrenaline, hypervigilant, hands itching for weapons as Alison stepped out and gave the press a shy smile.

And then he heard what they were shouting. It wasn't Alison's name.

It was his name.

All of his names.

_Sergeant Barnes! Mr Barnes! Soldier! James! Bucky! Over here! Winter Soldier! Look over here!_

“What the hell is going on?” he growled, glancing over to Calvin and Alison. Alison looked back blankly and gave a little shrug.

“Didn't you guys see the video?” Calvin asked, incredulous. “It's been all over the news. You saving Alison at the press conference. Catching fucking bullets! They worked out it was you because metal arm, duh, even though your face didn't show. Dude, I want a metal arm--”

“We're leaving,” Bucky said, reaching for the car door again.

“No. We're not,” Alison countered, and stepped in front of him. She smiled at the press as she laced her fingers into Calvin's and stepped forwards, chin up and radiating calm. “Thank you so much for coming out tonight. It's been a long day for me, which I think you all can appreciate. I'm unhurt after this morning's attempted shooting. I have to say, I wasn't convinced at first about having the Winter Soldier as my bodyguard-” Alison glanced back at him, smiling. “But it's only thanks to him that I'm alive right now. I'm looking forwards to a quiet dinner with my boyfriend and then getting back to preparing for Saturday's big concert event with Cadence Virtual Reality. Thank you.”

While the flashes of white light never abated as Alison spoke, the clamour of voices had. But immediately the cacophany started up again, and while some of the shouted questions began with _Alison_ or _Dazzler_ or _Miss Blaire_ , too many still began _Winter_ or _Bucky_ or _James_. What's more, the journalists were also blocking the entrance to the restaurant. They were stuck there, surrounded by a circle of baying people with flashing lights, the car cutting off their retreat. Even Alison was daunted, and Bucky was tipping towards the edge of what he could handle. He dropped a fighting knife down his sleeve into his flesh hand, running his thumb over the tiny grooves in the hilt that had been his compass, those first few days after the helicarrier crash.

Alison glanced over at him, his tense stance, the knife she could see by his side. “Do you trust me?” she asked quietly.

He nodded. He did trust her, with things like this. She maneuvered through the world with such assurance, such ease. He knew a hundred ways to read a person – microexpressions, scent, body posture, changes in temperature and heartbeat, voice inflection – but almost no ways of communicating with them. Twenty languages and nothing to say. Not to a roiling and potentially hostile crowd.

Alison spoke up again, and the crowd hushed. “The Winter Soldier and I will each answer three questions--”

 _What. NO. Like hell I will,_ thought Bucky.

“--Then if you can please call it a night. You're blocking the restaurant's doors and I think that cute couple with the baby want to get out.”

That caused some shuffling and embarrassment at the back of the mêlée, while the front bunch of reporters had spread away from Alison's group to the side after Bucky had started flicking his fighting knife in the air and from hand to hand. Crucially, there was more space around them, and more order. Which, yes, _result_ , Bucky thought. But questions...?

Alison answered her three, and talked about how it was twisted that she thought it was normal to receive death threats, because being even just one of female, mutant, black and successful was so much for some people they felt they had a right to force her to no longer exist.

Then it was Bucky's turn. Alison glanced meaningfully at the knife as it spun into the air, and raised an eyebrow. But damned if he was going to stop flipping it. After hearing Alison talk about her near-constant daily verbal harassment, however, he felt like he owed her to answer the three damn questions from the press. If she could do it, so could he. He stepped forwards, silent, and looking broader than he was thanks to his extra layers of clothing over his tac gear. He flicked the knife around the fingers of his metal hand, looked at the journalists, and tilted his head, waiting.

“Soldier! Who do you work for now?” shouted out a haggard-looking, overweight male reporter.

“Myself,” he said _._ “Lord of my learning, and no land beside.”

Then: a face he vaguely recognized. A journalist who he knew didn't like him. Christine something. “How do you sleep at night, with so much blood on your hands?”

His mouth pulled into a smirk under his mask. “Simple. I wash them before going to bed. Don't you?”

Then, two people shouted questions over each other, simultaneously: “Did you kill President Kennedy?” and “What is your relationship with Captain America, seeing as you to grew up--”

“My confirmed kill list with Hydra is a matter of public record. I suggest you look it up. And I have no relationship with Captain America.”

_But I do have one with Steve Rogers._

More questions exploded towards him.

“No.” He looked around at them. “We're done here.” He put his right hand gently between Alison's shoulder blades and stepped forwards with her towards the restaurant. A few more flashes went off but the journalists were backing down, moving away. He wasn't sure whether it was because they respected Alison's bargain with them – was there a game? Was that how it was played? – or whether it was because he was exuding as much menace as he could.

Then they were inside the restaurant and the noise and flashes were over. He leaned against the bar, arms folded, as Alison and Calvin were shown to their table. They ordered drinks and then Alison did something he didn't expect – got up from her table and walked over, leaning against the bar next to him.

“You were looking a little shaky there,” she said.

“I'm a soldier, not a superhero. My place is in the shadows.” He ducked his head, and he was glad for the mask, so she couldn't see his cheeks flush. “I can keep you alive. I can kill almost anything they send after you. But speeches? Interviews? No.”

“Yeah, you were sassy. They _haaate_ sassy, especially that Everhardt woman. She loves to dish it out, but mayonnaise _cannot_ take it. Don't read your press for the next 48 hours.”

“I never read my press.”

 

* * *

 

Alison and Calvin ate and kissed and drank champagne and took photos of each other. Bucky leaned against the bar and waited. Waited for a flicker of guilt in a face, waited for the scent of gunpowder or the sound of a too-fast heartbeat. Finally, as the restaurant was closing, Alison and Calvin got up. Calvin was trying to convince Alison to come on to a nightclub where some important DJ was playing. Bucky thanked whatever gods might still be listening to his prayers _(pretty sure not even the Devil at this point)_ that Alison said no, she was too tired.

As they left the restaurant, a middle-aged woman approached them on the street outside, her movements nervous and halting. “D-Dazzler--?” she asked. Bucky immediately flowed between Alison and the woman. Something was off--

Alison put her hand on his metal shoulder. “Relax, she probably just wants an autograph for her kid--”

But-- the smell-- a sweet, plasticky smell-- and the copper tang of recent blood--

A desperation crossed the woman's face. “Don't do the concert! You can't do the concert--” she cried, hands over her stomach, hunching over herself--

and Bucky _knew_ \--

He was already surging forwards, shoving the woman against his car and shouting “Get away, get away from here, away from the glass” as Alison and Calvin _just stood there_ and he could see the incision in the woman's belly now and she was struggling and he put his flesh hand over her mouth and jammed his metal hand through the stitches and there it was, hard in a place where things should only be soft, edge of a circuit board and the heavy block of C4, blasting cap and wires from the detonator and no time to try to defuse it in the woman's abdomen, he just yanked it out and the woman passed out from the pain and he let her fall to the pavement as he threw the explosive device as far as he could down the street with his metal arm. It detonated in mid-air about a block away, shattering windows and setting off car alarms.

Bucky picked up the woman and carried her back to the restaurant, kicking the door open. He lay her bleeding body on the floor and growled at the maitre d' to call 911, get an ambulance. The woman groaned, coming back to partial consciousness, and Bucky shoved his muzzled face into hers. “Who,” he said. “Who put that explosive in you?” Her eyes widened in terror and she passed out again.

He sighed and collected Alison and Calvin, who were clutching each other and still standing right next to the restaurant's floor to ceiling windows, like idiots who wanted to die from flying glass debris. He was too fucking tired to crawl around in the gutter to check for a new car bomb so he just reached under the Lamborghini and lifted one side of it up a few feet off the ground. Alison made a small choking sound and Calvin said _daaaamn_ as Bucky nonchalantly looked under the car, then gently set it down again. No bomb. Apparently whoever was on their back now thought putting bombs in people was better.

They drove back in silence, Bucky turning over in his head who he thought would use humans as explosive devices. That was low, even for Hydra, and the device itself was basic. Which meant it was probably Ten Rings. First the Maggia, now Ten Rings? After a pop starlet? None of it made sense. What could ending her life possibly gain Ten Rings? The Maggia could be a hit paid for by someone else, but Ten Rings were strange and solitary and worked only in their own byzantine interest.

Alison kissed Calvin goodbye and they made arrangements to meet up during the dress and tech rehearsal the next day.

She no longer argued when Bucky followed her into her bedroom and dragged a small bench to the section of wall that had the best sight lines to points of ingress and to her. She just turned to him, hazel eyes fearful and full of questions. “I'll end this,” he promised her. “I will find out who is behind all this, and I will stop them.” She nodded, a tear slipping from her eye, and curled up in the big four-poster bed.

Bucky folded himself into his night guard position on the bench. Alison had crashed out quickly, exhaustion helped along to oblivion by the couple of drinks she'd had at the restaurant. Normally he could achieve something like sleep, a sort of resting hypervigilance that sent him hurtling instantly back to wakefulness if there was the slightest change in the room's light or temperature or sound, but his brain was messy and loud in a way it hadn't been since his first few weeks out of Hydra. He needed his head to be clear, to work down cold corridors of operational logic and figure out what the _hell_ was going on, why ancient, secretive criminal organisations were getting hot and bothered about a pop concert. Instead he was off balance, bad thoughts ricocheting around inside him faster and faster.

Today had scraped him out and left him hollow, on edge. He desperately wanted to blow off his nervous energy: run through the night, as fast as he could. Drive back out to those corn-country dirt roads where there were no cameras, no onlookers and then let _loose_ , outrun the fucking wind, push his body to its absolute limit and then push a little further. Slink back in at dawn, tired and sweaty and euphoric.

But he couldn't leave Alison.

His next thought was to call Steve. But waking Steve at 2am with half-formed, paranoid thoughts about wanting to fake his own death and disappear again, about how he longed to be a ghost again, would only make Steve miserable too. Steve would be on the next flight out, full of questions and concerns and reassurances and just being _Steve_ , and _it was just some fucking flashbulbs and get it together, Barnes._

It wasn't just flashbulbs, though, was it? It was an altered human, fresh off the table, looking at him with hopped-up, bloody eyes, and saying _you're my hero_. It was Calvin, saying _I want a metal arm_. It was the ongoing bleed from Hydra's final act of desecration towards him: dumping his operational files online. Pushing him out of the shadows.

To vanish... to deceive them all... it would be so easy, though.

_Is this a sound tactical decision, or are you just running away? Like you ran away to work for Seamus' boys when you couldn't handle how looking at Stevie made you feel. And then ran away to the army when you screwed up with Gino and got the italians on your back._

What could he do, then? Step further into the light? Renounce his past and become a hero?

 _What if I don't want to renounce it? It's not pretty, but it's_ _**mine** _ _. I survived it. I will not let anyone sweep it under the carpet and pretend it never happened. Fuck you if you think you're going to bury my war. I won it. I am the only surviving witness of it. I am here. I_ _**won** _ _._

_And nothing you do can make me regret the way I fought it._

He thought about Steve, who loves him, _miraculously_ , as he is. Who doesn't ask questions, though Bucky knows that he has hundreds of them hidden behind his eyes. Who being with is as easy as breathing. Who lives in the light. Who, like all the Avengers, has a whole range of toys made in his image, so little boys and girls could play at being Captain America. 

He _can't_ be like Steve. He can't be an Avenger, shining, nonlethal, smiling for the cameras. Visiting hospitals and kissing babies. He's been remade so many times. He can't do it any more. _This_ is what he is. This was his final remaking, the most important one, the one he did all by himself.

But nobody should ever play at being _him_. The thought made him sick to his stomach.

When this is over he will step back into the dark. He is an expert at waiting. The fuss will die down, and he will be careful not to show his face again. There will always be a need for things to be done in the shadows, for things that brightly-costumed heroes cannot do. This has always been his role.

He sat, utterly still, eyes invisible behind his goggles, as the night deepens and takes all good boys and girls to slumber. Bucky knows the pandemonium in his mind will not quiet. There would be no rest for him tonight, only attempts to keep from spiralling into the sort of 3am paranoia that results in feverish desperation as the long minutes tick past towards distant morning.

So when the first couple ninjas drop into the room, Bucky Barnes smiles his terrible gratitude and decides to let the monster out to play.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter title song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J-_30HA7rec
> 
> This week is crazy with deadlines so Chapter 4 may be a bit delayed. I'm hoping to update weekly, by Monday/Tuesday at the latest.


	4. Seven Nation Army

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which a weapon realises he is not cut out for defense, and takes measures to fix that.

The Soldier decided it would be knives, and fists, and silence.

The luxurious hotel bedroom was dark, but for the pinpoint glows of various electronic devices: a clock; the power lights of a TV, a stereo, a phone. A half-moon sent its indifferent pale beams through the windows. The Soldier's eyes could see perfectly as a pair of silhouettes dropped down from an air shaft. They were almost noiseless; not quite. Or at least, not to him.

The two ninja were armed with blow-pipes. They wear black outfits piped in crimson: the uniform of The Hand, the Soldier's mind supplies. They land on their silent tabi boots on the hotel carpet, one ninja already swinging his blowpipe to aim at Alison.

He is too slow.

Hot blood and whistling air sings out from the gash in his throat and he falls, the delicate, beautiful blowpipe crushed under his weight.

The second ninja has already changed objective from Alison's sleeping form to the Soldier, and pulled out a pair of thin daggers with curved guards. _Sais_ , the operational part of his brain supplies. _You were trained in them_. _For the Tokyo mission. 1987._

The Soldier roundhouse-kicks the ninja through one of the suite's tall windows to his death, 60 stories below.

He sees Alison startle under her covers, sitting up bleary and confused at the loud crash of the shattering window glass. Then she startles again, when she looks at him, like she doesn't recognise him. There must be blood, from the first ninja he killed. It can't be his face. He's wearing his mask so she can't see his face.

He takes her by the upper arm and guides her to a closet. “Dozen more ninja incoming. Stay in here and don't come out until I get you out.” He cocks his head. “No. Not a dozen. Eleven.”

Alison tries to step back out of the closet, looking admirably fierce for someone in grey flannel pyjamas and a silk hair-wrap. “Crank up some tunes. I'll help.”

She's stopped by metal hand resting against her collarbone. “Not this time.”

“No, Bucky. I am not some _damsel_ \--”

The Soldier unhitches his mask, and smiles at her, eyes cold and empty.

She steps back into the closet. “Uh, don't take this wrong but you look kind of crazy right now.”

“I _am_ kind of crazy.” He thrusts the mask at her. “Put this on. Ninja have a thing for gas. The mask will filter it.” Then he shuts the slatted door to the closet and shifts his weight to face the second wave of ninja.

He can hear them, some moving near-silently through air vents; others dropping down the external wall of the building towards the hole in the window. The Hand's ninjutsu training, from what he's heard, was the only one that approached his own in terms of... intensity.

(“Brutality,” Steve had said. “The word you are looking for is brutality. It was _abuse_ , Buck.” No, Steve. It was _effective_. And he could take it.

He'd stopped talking about Hydra with Steve after that. Not that he had talked much about it beforehand, but now he just gave monosyllabic answers or changed the subject. Steve was trying to help, but Bucky couldn't say the thing that Steve needed to hear, and would never understand:

_Don't hate me, that when I was in hell I taught my body to love the flames._

There was more. He didn't want to explain why it was important, why it was _deliberate_ , that he force the bar for training to a level that would kill or break any others who tried to go through it. He didn't want Steve to know that he was operating on perilously incomplete information. Steve thought he had the complete history of the Winter Soldier. Sure, there were gaps in report timelines, and sure, most were due to cryo... but they could just as well be a stack of dusty files, specific years, specific incidents and operations, locked away in an anonymous safe-deposit box in Amarillo, Texas, until the Soldier decided what to do with them.) _(Burn them. He should burn them.)_

Bleeding eyes. Bad augmentation. _You're my hero._

Jesus. Hydra was a shitshow but at least it had _standards_.

( _His_ standards. The hunting dog trains its master; the leash is held on both sides.)

(Until, of course.... until 2010, when they _realised_. Until he tried to leave and, for the first time since he was activated in the 1950s, failed to achieve his objective. Until they started wiping him.)

The ninja creep in, tiny flashes of crimson in the night's blackness. The first two he killed would have been apprentices, hoping to graduate through a successful live mission. The main force, though, would be expert fighters with specific training against threats like him. Which, _yes,_ the void screams back at him. _At last, yes_. He stands ready. Fast, strong, trained to perfection. Facing off against eleven of Japan's greatest killers. Finally, a decent fight.

Even for a suite, the hotel bedroom isn't large: the Soldier has his back to the closet where Alison hid, and the four-poster bed blocked a good bit of useable aerial space. They can't mob him, but three ninja step out, circling, testing his boundaries. He smirks to himself at the inefficiency: despite a couple having short bows, they have opted not to use distance weapons, to engage hand-to-hand; he has opted not to use the arsenal of guns he has in the other room. A mutual curiosity...

In back, a fan is snapped open. It is in the hand of a tall ninja dressed all in crimson, a gold half-mask in the shape of a grimacing, fanged demon covering his lower face.

The Soldier exhales and settles himself. Nice of them not to bother asking him to surrender. Nice to deal with pros. His hands shift towards his knives and the first two are on him: a short, straight sword, the blade a little over two feet long and straight, thrusts towards his guts from one ninja; from the other, a spiked ball on a chain like a mace whistles to crush his knees. He jumps up, flipping in mid-air, and grabs the mace with his metal hand. He yanks, pulling its wielder's face onto the knife he has in his flesh hand, as he kicks out to connect with the neck of the ninja with the short sword. Nine left. As he is completing the move he feels the chain of a kusari-gama wrap around his kicking leg, pulling him off balance, the blade biting into his thigh.

He does not feel the pain. When he is like this, he feels _nothing_. It is wonderful. Addictive.

He lands on his hands as he wraps more of his leg around the chain and pulls it out of the hands of the ninja wielding it. She follows the direction of force and lands on his back as he flips up onto his feet again. Immediately her hands, in clawed neko-te gloves, are at his face, going for his eyes _nice try lady I could fight just as well blind_ and her fighting partner is slashing at him with a naginata and he dodges, compensating for the light, violent weight on his back and parries with his metal arm as a claw of the neko-te catches on his orbital bone. As he reaches up with his flesh hand and crushes the female ninja's wrist, the naginata leaves a nasty slice down his side. He crushes the woman's knee with his metal hand and bends forwards, throwing her over his head and onto the chain wrapped around his thigh, breaking her back. He flings her body at the ninja with the spear-like naginata but he dodges. The body lands on one of Alison's suitcases, sending clothes and underwear scattering across the hotel room. The Soldier pulls the kusari-gama out of his leg and throws it after her.

The ninja with the naginata is on him immediately, low slashes that have him bending backwards almost to the floor to dodge, then up again to hit: the dance of wing chun that he has not indulged in since a messy op in Shanghai in '98. He could be more efficient about this – grab the naginata, strike out with his full speed, separate the arm from the man - but the party's fun and he wants to make it last. Besides, it's not time to change fight styles yet: the other seven ninja are watching him, measuring his tactics, his speed, evaluating his reactions. The Soldier kicks a low sweep and the ninja climbs up the naginata to dodge, kicking what would be a rib-crushing blow to the Soldier's chest. But the Soldier's ribs are reinforced with metal and he brings his hands together hard on the ninja's thigh, shattering it. A harsh exhalation is the ninja's only admission of pain; the only noise in the room. Almost derisively, the Soldier kicks the naginata out from under the man, breaking it, and flicks the broken end into his hand. He stabs the ninja. Seven left.

Four attack him at once, katanas drawn, and he notes out of his peripheral vision that the remaining two ninja flanking the gold-masked leader have their short bows drawn, arrows ( _likelihood of poison: 99%_ , offers his brain) notched and aimed at him. The four ninja circling him move in a co-ordinated sword attack and there is nothing to do at first but exist on the defensive, a constant dodge and weave, while he waits for one of the swordsmen to make a mistake. They will falter before he does. He is quietly confident of that. His eyes glide over the gold-masked leader as he snakes between two sword thrusts. If this is one of the five leaders of the Hand, he needed to plan the rest of this fight very carefully to leave some surprises for him. The Soldier had faced one of their upper echelons, almost leader level, in Tokyo and it was the closest he came to ever failing a mission, before being wiped. He didn't fail, though. And he wouldn't fail here.

A cold fire across the back of his calf – the feeling of a blade cutting through the kevlar he wore under his black combats. He backflipped and pinned the blade to the ground with his metal hand, flicking a knife at the ninja wielding the sword. The ninja does not dodge in time. The Soldier flips forwards onto his feet again, kicking out as he goes, and the other three ninja scatter back momentarily. He tosses the sword in his metal hand, from blade to hilt, and circles, for all appearances a cornered dog, and just as rabid.

The two bowmen loose their arrows, after the smallest nod from the gold-masked leader. The slight gleam of light on the mask is what alerts the Soldier. He turns, whip-fast, raising the blade into the arrow's path. It slices, and the arrow's halves part harmlessly around him. The other arrow is wide, embedding deep and low in the closet door. There is a whimper from inside the closet and the Soldier cannot tell if it is fear, surprise, or pain. There will be more arrows. He cannot afford to play with his opponents any longer.

He puts weight onto his wounded leg and fakes a stumble. The three ninja move in for the kill. The Soldier smiles. As their swords are about to make contact he leaps upwards, decapitating the closest ninja and then swapping his sword into his right hand. He uses his left to punch up into the ceiling, turning his body on this new point of leverage, and dropping down behind another of the sword-wielding ninjas. He cleaves the ninja vertically in half as he lands, then turns to grab a flying arrow with his metal arm, the arrowpoint an inch from his head. The slight distraction is enough for the final of the four sword-ninjas to drive his blade into the Soldier's side. The Soldier does not hesitate, just runs up the blade (the metal cold inside him, but he is colder) and stabs the ninja in the face with the arrow. The ninja convulses, veins blue-ing with toxins, vomiting blood and froth.

The Soldier pulls the katana out of his side with his free hand and twirls it, beckoning to the gold-masked leader and his two remaining minions.

_Wounds: deep laceration on left thigh. Minor laceration on right calf. Through and through puncture on right abdomen, likely intestinal damage. Minor lacerations around eyes. Operational efficiency: still within acceptable parameters._

The ninjas drop flash bombs, and a smoky gas that quickly fills the room, billowing out the smashed window like a plume.

The Soldier flows backwards, until he is once again guarding the closet door. He hopes that his mission has the sense enough not to touch the arrow point embedded in the wood. In fact... he reaches back and pulls it out. The action feels futile, as he hears bowstrings sing again. No time. The poison wouldn't kill him, but it might disable him. He flings one of the katana through the smoke towards the sound, and smirks as he hears a shocked gurgle and the thump of a falling body. Return fire from the remaining bowman thunks into the place his head had been a moment earlier, everyone firing blind through the smoke but both the Soldier and the Hand had been trained to not need to _see_ their targets. He throws a dead body against the closet door to shield Alison and dives into a low somersault, moving towards the sound of the bowstring and the scent of the wax used to keep it supple. Arrows whirr over his head like furious insects. The hotel carpet reeks; full of the iron tang of blood and the sour smell of spilled guts. Some of it is his. He pushes off the floor with his hands as he sees the vague shadow of the bowman through the smoke, and grabs the man's neck in his knees. A swift twist and the dull pop of a severed spinal cord, and the body goes limp.

He rolls up just in time for a foot to slam into his abdominal wound. In the clearing smoke, a gold half-mask gleams, its grin macabre. There is no recovery time as a thick black fan, its edge gleaming with razors, whistles towards his neck. He twists, and there is the other fan, cutting down to sever a hamstring. But his leg is not there; he does not need recovery time. There is only the objective and that objective is thirteen dead goddamn ninja and twelve down, one to go, motherfucker.

The leader is fast, and moves like a willow, full of a supple and deadly grace. They are probably matched in speed: the Soldier's enhanced body is slowed by wounds and nearly four days awake, and weighs almost a hundred pounds more than the reed-thin ninja commander. In hand to hand skill... the Soldier thinks it's been a long time since a single opponent pressed him this hard. If ever. He waits, blocking and feinting while he learns his opponent, waits for the inevitable mistake. The blows – a conversation of martial arts styles, from muay thai to Okinawan forms to Shaolin and ninjutsu and beyond - are almost too fast for the unenhanced eye to see and the Soldier pushes his body to the limit, arcing under, above and around the razor fans that seek to bite into his flesh. The human mouth inside the gold-mask grimace smiles wider and wider as the Soldier loses ground, pushed back towards the four-poster bed that had caused Alison's eyes to light up even more than the ridiculous yellow piano in the adjoining sitting room.

He slips on a puddle of... something, and before he can regain his balance there is a razor gleam too close to his eye. Cold fire slices across his cheek and he twists away and he is suddenly flat on his back on the bed like a new bride, convulsions wracking through him, cold flowers of poison blossoming in his bloodstream.

Teeth gleam bright and triumphant behind a gold grimace, and the fans are gone, replaced by long knives with strange, waved blades.

They arc downwards towards the Soldier's heart, but not before the tiniest fraction of a second of gloating, of pride behind the mask for being the one to finally kill the Winter Soldier.

Overbearing in victory.

The Soldier's hands flash out and grab the ninja commander's forearms, and the Soldier twists his body with all its monstrous, enhanced strength and _throws_. So far he has met grace with grace. Now he will meet it with brutality. He will continue to function.

The crimson-robed ninja is smashed through the drywall between rooms and crashes into the piano beyond with a dischordant clang of pulverised enamel and jangling wires.

The Soldier follows, lurching unsteadily through the gaping, powdery hole in the wall and is there as the ninja rises; his fist is there. The man still dodges and the piano shatters further under blows from indestructible metal, but now he is on the defensive, boxed into a corner with nowhere to go. He tries to sweep the Soldier's legs from under him, at the same time as jabbing for the Soldier's neck with an elbow which now ends in a knife point – but the elbow meets a metal hand, and the low kick does not have enough force to budge the Soldier's stance. He twists the elbow and the man flows with it into a flip, trying to get free, but there is nowhere to go. First the blade splinters, then the joint it has been strapped to. The man does not wince, but he is forced to the ground.

He places a heavy boot on the ninja commander's throat. The gold mask has fallen off; the man's face means nothing to the Soldier but he memorises it anyway. “What does the Hand want with Dazzler?” he asks, his voice rough with the first words to be spoken since the ninja attacked.

The ninja's eyes narrow as he passes a hand across his own abdomen. He must have had a small blade hidden between his fingers, because the crimson of his uniform begins to darken wetly in a line, and then he is coughing blood, frothing from poison. The Soldier shoves his boot down and breaks the ninja's neck. He had not really expected answers from the Hand.

He walks slowly back towards the bedroom and leans against the door frame, surveying the carnage and allowing his metabolism to finish burning through the poison. He is below minimum operational efficiency. His body shakes with the effort of remaining standing. The smoke has dispersed through the window and there is only a dull haze over the bodies and discarded weaponry of his most recent battlefield. He picks up one of the fallen katanas. It looks old, and nicely made. He tucks it into the straps of his back holster. There is a second, its near twin, and he takes that too.

_Mission successful. Target defended. Proceed to extraction._

Then the Soldier remembers that there is no extraction point, there is no team to remove his equipment, clean his uniform and gear, and check him for maintenance. There will not be the embrace of cryo, the promise of sleep.

There is only him.

And soon he must allow everything that he's locked away in the safe part of his head to come out again: Personality. Emotion. Pain. Fear.

He would have to become human again.

But not yet.

He opens the closet a few inches and looks down at Alison. She is alive, but pale. And wearing his mask. Good Mission. Listened for once. He smiles.

She looks at him and flinches away. He has caused the Mission to be afraid of him. Perhaps it is the blood.

“Close your eyes,” he says. She does.

He opens the closet all the way and picks her up, bridal-style. His muscles shiver. Operational efficiency approaching redline levels. He carries her into his room, and lays her on the side of the bed where his arsenal and cleaning supplies aren't laid out. He quickly rolls the weapons away in a messy cloth bundle and stashes them on the room's small desk.

The Mission is shivering.

Something in the locked-away part of his mind is banging on the door, yelling for attention, but he pushes it down. Later. He has no time now for the parts of him that hurt.

The Mission's health must be maintained. He covers the Mission in a quilt from the room's closet, and reaches down and unclasps his mask from over her face. She tries to open her eyes but he puts his hand over them. “Not yet,” he says, his voice hoarse. “When you hear the door close. Don't leave the room. I'll be back soon.” She nods, and he removes his hand.

He shuts the door as he goes.

He surveys the disaster that is the suite's master bedroom and steps from body to body, making sure they are all dead. Out the broken window, a movement catches his eye: an abandoned grappling line, used by one of the ninja to infiltrate the room. It is hooked to the building's roof, only a few stories away.

The Soldier smiles to himself. He has an idea.

The hotel's roof is large and flat. He shouldn't be climbing at this level of inefficiency, and he especially shouldn't be carrying weight, but his metal arm once again makes this possible.

It turns out that the corpses of 12 assassins are sufficient to spell out “FUCK OFF” in dead ninja across the roof. The one he kicked out the window makes a nice sort of punctuation mark on Michigan Avenue, below.

He is quite sure the Hand have access to satellite reconnaissance.

He saves the gold mask.

 

* * *

 

Alison had fallen into an exhausted, shallow sleep, but she startles at the gentle knock on the door. “Bucky?” she whispers.

“Not quite,” he says, walking in. Her bodyguard has showered and is no longer wearing his blood-drenched combat gear, but his eyes still have that peculiar blankness. It freaks her out, because his eyes are normally full of expression, full of life. Now they're just... empty, and surrounded by vicious scratches and a long cut down his cheek that are already starting to heal over. There is a towel low on his hips, and another, soaked with blood, pressed to his side. She has about eight conflicting thoughts at once including _Bucky where are your pants_ and _oh yeah I'm in your room where your clothes are_ and _holy lord jesus that is a lot of blood_ and _please don't die_ and _are we safe now_ and _fucking hell you have a lot of muscles_. “Can you sew?” he asks.

Alison stares at him. There is horrible scarring all over his chest, radiating outwards from where his metal arm meets his body.

“Can you sew,” he asks again, his voice flat and emotionless as he turns away from her and pulls out a small, battered metal box from one of his black duffels. It looks like the sort of thing her dad used to keep fishing tackle in. He also pulls out a large pistol.

“What?” she said. Then, as her brain caught up with her, “No. Sewing, nope.”

He grunts and sits down on the floor, facing away from her. He puts the pistol on one side of him (the side with the metal arm) and the box on the other. The box opens and Bucky pulls out a small can of spray, a strange, half-circle needle, and some thread. He moves the bloody towel, sprays the wound on his stomach, and begins calmly sewing it up, not that Alison can see because he's facing away. She feels mildly nauseous anyway, as blood continues to seep out of the corresponding exit wound on his back. But he doesn't move, doesn't react at all to stitching himself up, not even an involuntary twitch of muscle. She wants to ask _does this hurt you_ but she also isn't sure she wants to hear the answer.

But then Bucky does that annoying mind-reading thing and says, without turning around, “I have two more to stitch up. Watching it might make you sick.”

She pulls a pillow over head. About 20 minutes later she hears him stand up and rustle around. The clock says it's only 5am and the sky is beginning to lighten out the window. She has a tech rehearsal today at the auditorium, and costume final fittings. And people and questions and how about a smile, Dazzler. How the hell is she going to make it through a full rehearsal? She wants to crawl under the covers and never get up, or at least wake up somewhere warm where she has no responsibilities and people aren't trying to kill her at every turn. And there is a horrible, keening, screeching sound in the room and god someone turn it off and then she realises it's her, and her cheeks are covered with wet tears. She starts shaking uncontrollably--

 

* * *

 

The Soldier finishes dressing his wounds and puts his maintenance box away. He puts on fresh combat gear but doesn't add yet his sheaths and holsters, or the heavy tac jacket. Just a soft grey t-shirt. He attends to nutritional maintenance and gives himself a few extra supplement shots to help with the healing process. The nutrition packs help ease the ache in his head.

He watches the sun rise out the window as he scans nearby buildings for signs of sniper activity.

He analyses.

He needs backup. He is not a defensive weapon. He needs someone to cover his primary mission while he engages in offensive manouvers to determine the source of the danger to the mission and eliminate it. He needs a shield.

He finds his phone and sends a text.

The Mission starts making sounds. The Soldier identifies them as noises of fear and shock. He has no training for this.

He sits down, back to the wall, and unlocks the other part of his mind.

_Goodnight, nothing._

 

The wave of pain nearly knocks Bucky over.

He breathes his way through it, panting, barely keeping himself from greying out. _Fuck_. It never gets better. Pain and on top of the sickly, plastic feeling of his body re-knitting itself.

Alison is keening. He pushes himself to his feet and stumbles over to sit on the bed next to her. “Hey. Hey, hey hey. It's okay. The bad people are gone,” he says, rubbing circles into her back through the covers. “You're in shock. It's okay.”

Alison's face peeked out from under the covers and looked at him, assessingly. “You're back,” she says.

“I've been here the whole time. Hey, I have katanas now. Want to see--”

“No,” she says, her tone sharp with the sort of anger that walks two steps behind fear. “No, Bucky. Your face... It was like you weren't there. Like someone else was driving.”

“It was still me.” Bucky ran a hand through his hair. “There's... it's like a spectrum. You slide things all the way in one direction, you get... _that_. You get the Winter Soldier. But it's always me. The thing you saw, it's me right now, too. Just... a more extreme form.” He sat back. “I don't work like normal people, Alison. I'm still figuring it all out myself. But I'm _different_ , okay? I'm different. I can understand if what you saw means that...” He waved his metal hand, the pink light of dawn glinting off the plates, as he struggled for the right words.

Alison looked over at her faithful tin soldier, at the dark circles under his pale eyes, the exhausted pallor of his skin. At the new wounds criss-crossing his entirely too pretty face, wounds received to protect her. “No, it's--”. Her voice choked off in a sob and she failed at words too, so instead she reached out and hugged him, close, hard as she could, sniffling tears into his clean t-shirt. At first he tensed, then gradually softened, relaxed, and his arms moved to hug her too.

They sat like that, warming each other, for long minutes, as the sun continued to light the morning sky, pink fading to dirty yellow to the beginnings of blue over the Chicago skyline. “That was a lot of ninjas,” she said at last, into his shoulder.

“Yeah. It was.”

“What happened to them?”

He told her about the roof.

She snorted snot all over his shoulder as she laughed.

 

* * *

 

Rehearsal was awful. This was their first day setting up in the United Center and everything went too slow. Tech was behind, costumes looked uncomfortable, and everyone felt... _off_ , unused to the different stage layout.

Bucky hated the space. Hated the size of it, how many strangers were around, how easily one could slip up to Alison with a poisoned stiletto or a dart.

The one benefit of United Center over the regular rehearsal space was he could disappear into the rafters, watching everything through the scope of his favourite 98-Bravo, patrolling the heights and trying not to think about how on edge he was. Normally, lack of sleep for extended periods was no problem for him, but the fighting and the wounds and the hypervigilance was creeping up on him, sending dull, aching sparks behind his eyes, down his neck.

The music wasn't helping. Calvin was apparently still making adjustments to the song for the big virtual reality download, but they played it about 50 times for Alison to practice the visual component the way Cadence wanted and it made his head hurt. It wasn't a bad mix. Quite the opposite – it was exciting, poppy, a little avant-garde and very danceable. The sort of song if he heard it in a club it would send him onto the floor. But today... the samples were a grating burst of compressed sound, almost like a modem tone, and it plus some of the abrupt flashes from Dazzler's light show... his head hadn't hurt that much in a long time. He pulled his goggles down over his eyes and adjusted them to infrared, and the tense pain cleared almost immediately.

Which was good, because if he felt any worse he was going to have to sink into Soldier mode just to get through the day.

Alison wasn't much happier, he could tell. Lots of shaking her head and pacing. Her eyes often scanned the high shadows of the stadium, and when she did that he would send her a text: variants of  _don't worry, still here_.

There were no actual threats against Alison that day.

Bucky's paranoia (entirely justified at this point, he thought) had counted and monitored dozens of potential threats.

"If the first day of dress is bad, the concert is always good," Alison said on the way home, hope and exhaustion mingling in her voice. "If dress is good, then it means something's going to go wrong later."

Bucky was sure something was going to go wrong later anyway, but he didn't want to ruin the tenuous optimism in the air.

 

* * *

 

They changed suites, _again_. This time within the same hotel. Bucky muttered something about safehouses but Alison put her foot down. They were staying at the Langham and she was getting a hot shower, room service, and all her clothes dry cleaned and it was final. Bucky almost turned away fast enough to hide his grin.

Alison popped open her biggest suitcase and started to unpack. She dumped clothes into two piles: bloodstained and not bloodstained. Ugh. There was a hole in her favourite leather jacket from an arrow. She was never leaving clothes out around her hotel room again. _Yeah, I know, mama_ , she thought. _You told me so. You didn't say nothing about ninjas, though._

“I have blood on my favourite bra, Bucky,” she said, brandishing a pretty, emerald-green lace confection at him.

He grabbed it out of her hand and sniffed the dried blood. “Not mine,” he said, tossing it back. “We could send the Hand your dry-cleaning bill?”

“You got an address for them?”

“Sort of--” Bucky suddenly stilled, cocking his head, listening to something only he could hear. He was out of the room before Alison can react, growling “stay there” at her before slinking quickly and noiselessly towards the suite's main door.

Alison smirked as she heard the door fly open, then a startled cry and a heavy thud of something being smashed into a wall. Ha. That would teach whoever was trying to kill her today to mess with her tin soldier.

But then... silence.

He should be back by now. There should be noise, at least the equivalent of _don't worry, still here_. Had they gotten him? Had that thud been Bucky being captured or knocked out? Like, was that even possible? A shiver passed over her heart and she was moving before she could second-guess herself.

She peeked around her new bedroom door into the main room. And _hells yes_ , the Winter Soldier had some huge and possibly superhuman blond guy pinned to the wall, arms above his head, and he was--

And he was _kissing_ him--

Not just kissing, but _making out_ with him like the fate of the Free World depended on it. The blond man let out a quiet, throaty moan that was _indecent_.

Alison could feel the blush burning into her cheeks as she took a step backwards. Maybe she could just--

It was too late. Bucky broke away from the blond's kiss-reddened lips with a little annoyed huff and glared at her with his ice-blue eyes. “I _told_ you to stay in the other room.”

“Sorry,” Alison mumbled, not quite sure where to look. She cast her eyes down, taking in the duffel bag and what looked like a large cymbal case near the blond man's feet.

Bucky released the blond's wrists from where he'd pinned them with his metal hand, and indicated her. “Stevie, this is Alison. You'll love her. She never listens either.”

“Um, hi,” said the blond, blushing spectacularly, stepping into the lounge area of the suite. The blush deepened as Bucky came up behind him and slipped arms around his waist, all the while biting a hickey into his neck.

And then Alison realised who the blond was. Her knees got weak and she fumbled her way over to the nearest sofa before she embarrassed herself. Bucky's guy, the one that he got stupid over and whose sexts had him grinning at his phone, was _Captain America_. And they had kept it so far on the downlow that there were barely even _rumours_. Which was pretty amazing seeing as the heat between them was enough to cause nearby small objects to spontaneously combust.

Bucky casually laced his fingers in with Steve's, and flopped down on the sofa opposite Alison.

“Steve's going to watch over you tonight, while I go out and visit our friends in the Maggia. Got some questions for them.”

Steve groaned as he sat down, close to Bucky. “Is that why you wanted your baseball bat?”

Bucky just pressed his face into Steve's neck and grinned.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter title song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0J2QdDbelmY
> 
> (There's also the awesome Flaming Lips version where Wayne Coyne yells Butthole Surfers lyrics over the 7NA guitar line. I don't really like the Lips but this is still class: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AHsLZ7zYKsQ )
> 
> Sorry for long delay in updates. Besieged by deadlines and life crap, plus this chapter didn't go down easy.


	5. Gangsters

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Phil Coulson has the worst timing in the world.

Steve ran a finger along Bucky's jaw; looked assessingly at the dark circles under his eyes, at the pronounced hollows under his cheekbones. Bucky drove himself too hard. Not that Steve wasn't guilty of pushing himself to extremes, either, but Bucky had a frightening way of dissociating himself from his most basic physical feelings (pain, hunger, fatigue) that made Steve... well, that made Steve want to resurrect Arnim Zola and Alexander Pierce just to kill them all over again more slowly.

He didn't want to have a rehash of the frankly disastrous “It's okay to be nice to yourself” / *blank uncomprehending stare* “Softness kills, Stevie” argument of about four months ago. That wouldn't get them anywhere except days of slammed doors and strained silences. And Bucky had asked for _help_. That in itself was... huge.

Bucky normally didn't even say where he was going on contracts. Steve had gotten used to that. It didn't mean he liked it, but since he'd regularly vanish on Avengers business too, he couldn't really criticise that aspect of Bucky's life. Bucky would give him an estimated time away, then he'd eventually reappear and sometimes there'd not be a scratch on him and sometimes it would be like today, where he was beat to shit, covered in bruises and lacerations and... Steve's eyes skated down Bucky's figure on the sofa, where his t-shirt was rucked up slightly. Was that seriously _duct tape_ on his abdomen?

Steve's entire body tensed with the desire to push Bucky's shirt up further, to find every wound and scratch and bruise and kiss them all better. He wanted to pass his thumbs over Bucky's cheekbones, and magically erase the darkness under his eyes, smooth out the tired, frayed look he had.

He set his jaw and narrowed his eyes at Bucky. “Buck, how long has it been since you've slept?”

“M'fine, Stevie.” Bucky leaned forwards to nip at Steve's earlobe. “I've been cat-napping--”

“At least three days,” Alison said, cutting him off. Bucky shot her his most murderous look but Alison just raised her eyebrows like _fight me, oh wait you can't, because then you'll fail your mission._ She turned to Steve. “Also does he actually eat food? Because it's also been three days of nil by mouth.”

“Fuck, this was a terrible idea. You've known each other five minutes and you're already teaming up on me.”

“ _Buck...”_

“Stevie, food is a waste of time that I don't fucking have. I can't spend half a day ordering and eating all the crap my stupid metabolism needs. We've been a little goddamn busy here. The way I handle it is more efficient, _that's final_.”

 _Yeah, right. Because Steve Rogers ever let anyone else have the last word in an argument_ , Bucky thought, as Steve crossed his arms and leaned back on the sofa. “You're seriously telling me you'd pass up steak frites and a hot fudge sundae for shots and those disgusting gel-pack things?”

Bucky pressed his lips together. “Yes.”

Steve got up and stretched. “Well, that's too bad, Buck, because after you wake up from the three-hour nap I'm about to force you to take, I was going to order room service for all of us. I guess we'll just order it for ourselves while you're asleep, then. And no coming out and stealing our fries. Right, Alison?”

Alison tried to keep the wicked smile out of the corners of her mouth as she pantomimed a thoughtful look. “Oh, yeah. But don't get me fries. I want fried chicken and greens and sweet potato pie. Oh, and see if they have red velvet cake, too.”

“I hate you all,” mumbled Bucky.

“That's okay,” said Steve, bumping Bucky, body-blocking him towards the bedroom door. “Something something blah blah training efficiency blah Hydra indestructible super-assassin.” Bump. “Go to bed, hotshot.” Shove.

Bucky braced his hands in his bedroom doorway and glared over his shoulder at Steve. “I took down 13 ninja, Steve. By myself. With two knives.”

“I know, Buck. Your, uh, roof art is Tony's new favourite screensaver.” Shove.

“At least _someone_ appreciates me.”

“I appreciate you,” yelled Alison. “But I also think you should listen to your boyfriend.”

“Alison, for every piece of fried chicken you give me, I will tell you a different story about why nobody should listen to Captain America about anything,” yelled Bucky back. “Five buckets of chicken should take us up to, I dunno, 1944?”

“Says the idiot who travelled to Hell to pick a fight with the Devil,” Steve said. Then, for the benefit of the other room: “Alison, no part of that previous sentence was a metaphor.”

“You. Punched. A. Tank.”

Steve kicked the bedroom door shut behind them and pointed. _“Bed.”_ He tried to glare but the corners of his mouth kept quirking into a grin.

Bucky huffed in mock-annoyance as he sat down on the bed. Then he bit his lower lip and his expression morphed into one of _pure filth_. “You gonna help me get to sleep, Rogers?” he whispered, voice thick and low.

Steve made a half-successful effort at radiating innocence and purity. “I dunno, Barnes. These walls look a little thin. Wouldn't want to make your friend uncomfortable--”

Steve had more to say, and he really did intend to leave and just let Bucky sleep... but then there was a metal hand hooked into the top of his jeans, tugging him closer, pulling him between lean, muscular thighs. And then Bucky phrased it as a dare.

“My stealth capabilities are phenomenal, Steve. We can make this a silent mission.”

“Oh really,” said Steve. “What do I get if you break cover?” He was 99% sure Bucky was playing him, because Bucky knew full well that Steve Rogers never backed down from a dare. He was also so close to Bucky he could feel the heat radiating off him, smell the faint metallic tang of dried blood from his injuries.

Steve frowned.

“Ugh, _what_ ,” Bucky groaned, flopping back on the bed. He knew that frown. Nothing fun ever came after that frown. Bye, fun. It was nice almost knowing you.

“It's just...” Steve tugged up Bucky's shirt and looked at the bandaged cuts and stitched-up wounds, and the goddamn duct tape he'd used to hold the bandages in place. “You're pretty cut up, Buck, all over. I don't want to put my hands wrong and rip your sutures--”

Bucky quirked a half-smile and hooked his leg around Steve's thighs, knocking the blond onto the bed on top of him. Steve grunted in surprise as he fell, but Bucky didn't make a sound, even though Steve was pretty sure he'd elbowed Bucky right on the long laceration down his side when he landed. “One: I don't care.” Then Steve could feel Bucky writhing under him, pulling off his sweatpants with, Steve thought, entirely more hip-grinding than was strictly necessary. His carefully-laid plans for a tactical retreat were now being countermanded by a new set of orders from his prick, which was achingly hard. A warm metal hand pushed its way down the front of his pants, and a hoarse voice whispered in his ear: “Two, if you care: then use your damn _mouth_ instead.”

And so he did.

Steve slid off the bed onto his knees, and grabbed Bucky's ass, pulling him to the edge of the mattress.

Never let it be said that Steve Rogers doesn't listen to Bucky Barnes' suggestions. (He just doesn't listen to them very often.)

A few minutes later, looking up at Bucky biting his bottom lip, long neck arched and vulnerable, head thrown back as he came in total silence, Steve thought he had never seen anything so beautiful. He sighed and hummed, gently sucking his boyfriend through the aftershocks as he sped up and roughened the strokes of his hand on his own dick. As his mouth slipped off Bucky, the brunet reached his left arm down and hauled Steve back onto the bed next to him. Bucky lay down onto his side and pulled Steve down, so they were facing each other, foreheads inches apart. Steve could already feel his own orgasm starting to build inside him when Bucky placed his hands on either side of Steve's face and just looked into his eyes, straight into him, and there was _so much love_ in his eyes and then Bucky brushed his thumb ever so gently across the tenderest part of Steve's lower lip and Steve _came_ and he kept his eyes open and kept looking at Bucky's eyes so close he could see the movements of blue in the irises like waves, like tides, and Steve couldn't help himself, he was crying at the same time, he could feel the tears plodding down his cheeks and he had no idea _why_ he was crying it was all just _so much_ and Bucky was kissing the tears away so softly and his cheeks were wet too and they held each other and it was 2016 and they were _here_ and for _once_ in their goddamn lives everything was going even better than okay and it was _so much_.

When Steve finally left, Bucky's eyes were already shut, his breathing slow, face young and innocent in rest.

 

* * *

Bucky had only been asleep for 20 minutes when the knock came.

Steve swore under his breath and motioned to Alison to stay where she was. He walked cautiously to the door, quietly picking up his shield on the way past.

 _If they wake Bucky up I swear to God--_ Steve thought. Then, _who am I kidding. Bucky probably woke up when they were 50 feet down the hallway from the room, and if I asked, could tell me how many weapons they're carrying, what calibre, and where on their body based on how they are walking._ When it came to covert ops work, Bucky could do things that were just... spooky. Steve knew he was stronger than Bucky, healed faster, and was a better leader/team player; but Bucky had him on speed, marksmanship and enhanced senses. It stood to reason. The US Government had wanted a better infantryman; Hydra had wanted a hunter-killer.

The knock came again. Steve opened the door, his face stormy.

A mild, medium-height man waited outside, his hands held up in the universal sign for _don't shoot, I mean no harm_ , a few feet from the door. He wore a conservative grey suit, and had intelligent eyes and thinning, dark hair. The man blinked owlishly, then lowered his hands. “Steve. I wasn't expecting you here.”

“Coulson.” SHIELD's new Director. A good man, but among the last people on earth Steve wanted to see right now.

_Bucky was not only awake but probably halfway across Chicago right now. Goddamn it all to Hell._

“May I come in?”

Steve sighed. “Your timing's awful, Phil.”

“Yes, well, normally when we're stretched this thin we let Chicago PD handle mass killings, even when they involve a... posthuman element. But given that one of the deceased may be one of the five Fingers of the Hand, SHIELD is taking a very close interest.” A thoughtful look crossed Phil Coulson's face. “How many people have to die for it to be considered a mass killing? Is it just double digits? I think 13 definitely qualifies, though. Don't you?”

Steve stepped aside. Coulson brushed past him into the sitting room and inclined his head at Alison, who was doing a very accurate impression of one of Bucky's murder faces back at him. “And you must be Dazzler. Your music is very popular among our team.”

“What do you want, Phil?” Steve asked, shutting the door.

“I need to have a brief chat with your... well, I know he still works under the codename Winter Soldier, but would I be wrong in calling him Bucky?”

Alison snorted. “James, or Soldier, if he doesn't know you.”

Coulson touched his temple in a small salute of gratitude, then turned his attention back to Steve. “This is a courtesy call, Steve. He needs to come in for debrief. I am aware that a full police or even a full SHIELD team investigation would be... detrimental to Ms Blaire and quite alarming to your friend, but he has killed over two dozen people in the last 24 hours alone. And while I don't think any of them will be greatly missed, we do have laws in this country.”

Alison sprang to her feet, furious. “Bucky was defending _me_. He stopped people who were _actively trying to kill me_. You can get all to hell with your bullshit accusations--”

“Sit down, Alison,” Steve sighed, motioning towards the sofa. “This is... not about this.”

“Oh, but it is. He has information on the Hand that we want,” said Phil. “Doesn't have to be formal. You can come too, Just two old friends and a new one, having a mutually beneficial chat in a coffee shop.”

“He's not going to talk to SHIELD, Phil.” Steve put his hands on his hips. “Two guesses as to why. Or, more accurately, one guess, but if you get it, two more grow in its place.”

“Yet he will happily undertake jobs for known criminal organizations. I'm failing to understand, Steve.”

Steve went looking for a piece of paper. “I'm the wrong person to talk to about this. If you want to get in touch with Bucky about a business thing, you call this lady named Miriam, I have her number--”

“I know of Miriam,” said Coulson in a flat tone of voice, a flicker of annoyance passing across his face.

Steve's eyebrows shot up almost to his hairline. “Oh. _Oh_. You've spoken to her  _already_.” And Miriam had said no. Miriam was protective of Bucky. He was her most prized freelancer, at her agency with no name, where for a small fortune you could hire individuals with very rare, particular skill sets to do almost anything you wanted. While Steve had never met or spoken to Miriam himself, he was gradually getting a positive impression of her. If indeed she existed at all as a real human being... _the dark side of the street_ , as Bucky called it, was a tangled forest of reflections, paranoia, and false identities.

“He would be a tremendous asse-, um, of tremendous _assistance_ to us--” Coulson frowned, shooting Steve an assessing look as Steve's face flushed and his muscles twitched in anger. “Ah. I see. You're angling for him to become an Avenger.”

“Get out,” Steve said, very quietly. “You have five seconds.”

Coulson turned and left, pausing in the doorway. “If you change your mind...”

“He is not a fucking trading card, Coulson.”

Phil Coulson's eyes widened at Captain America dropping a class-A swear bomb. _They have no idea_ , Steve thought, stalking forwards and placing his hand on the door.

Steve used admirable restraint in only shutting the door in Coulson's face. And then promptly ruined it by turning and putting his fist through the drywall. “He is not an _asset_. He is a _person_ ,” Steve whispered.

He pulled his fist out of the wall and shook his hand, bits of plaster and drywall flicking off onto the carpet.

“I met Nick Fury once. I liked Fury better,” said Alison.

Steve's shoulders sagged as he turned towards Bucky's room. “I hate spies.”

As Steve both feared and expected, Bucky's room was empty. The baseball bat was gone, as was one of the black duffel bags. Steve looked up and spoke softly. “Buck? Any chance you're in an air vent or something? Please?”

Then he felt the small prickle of breeze, saw a slight movement of curtain. A window had been shut almost, but not quite, all the way. Left open just enough so it wouldn't latch. Steve opened it and looked down. They were 38 stories up in the air, with a corner suite; the view down to the street was dizzying. Below the window, Steve could see five long scratches in the hotel's stone facade, the kind of scratches made by the sort of fucking idiot who rappels down high-rise buildings using no equipment other than a metal arm. The sort of person who threw his own life around like it was a dirty nickel he found in the street.

Steve sighed. He _really_ hated spies.

 

* * *

Count Nefaria was a busy man, and since he had relocated from Naples to Chicago to further his American ambitions, his empire stretched from the Upper Midwest through to the Mediterranean. Drugs, weapons, people, protection... there wasn't much you couldn't buy or sell from Family Nefaria, and as such, he woke up for morning in Italy and stayed up through the American evening. But now, after dinner, after all the business was complete and the lieutenants dismissed, the wife and younger children kissed and sent to bed, he had an hour to himself in his study. A grappa, the next day's newspaper, maybe a dirty magazine... he sighed in anticipation as he pushed open the heavy, carved mahogany doors to his own haven.

It was a place of leather-bound books, bound editions of favourite comics like _Lucky Luke_ and _Dampyr_ and _Diabolik,_ and soft carpets that took away all noise and care. He ambled towards the drinks trolley on the way to his comfortable chair and big desk under the portrait of his mother, the founder of the family business. She had been a minor Borgia... He looked in his sixties now, and had been publicly head of the family for thirty years this time around – a miraculously long time as a _capo_ in any family. He knew such quiet evenings would end soon. Some of the lieutenants already looked at him out the sides of their eyes, the ungrateful fucks, _too old_ , they thought. We should be in bitcoin. We should be in dark web. We have new ways. _The Count is too old. He holds us back._ Soon, there would be a Succession. It would be violent, or it would be calm, and he would need to fade away for a few generations until there were no human members among the made men who remembered his face.

He had been placing the chess pieces on the board for that succession, slowly, quietly, for the past twenty years. He knew he would need to devote all his time to the final preparations very soon, that they would swallow him whole – possibly literally as well as figuratively. But... a new complete edition of the work of Guido Crepax (inflamer of his increasingly erratic desires) had arrived in the mail that morning, and... the Succession could wait. One more day. He poured his _digestif_ in a small crystal glass as he mentally toasted the words of St Augustine: _Oh Lord, make me moral... but not yet._

“Nice pictures,” said a rough, low voice, and Count Nefaria fumbled his glass as he reached for the silent alarm button below the drinks trolley.

“Oh, that's disconnected,” said the voice again. Someone was sitting at the Count's desk, but facing away, so the chair's tall back concealed his identity.

The Count reached for the small handgun holstered at his back. “Punisher?” he said, but something seemed off, this wasn't the New York mob hunter's _modus_ \-- also he _must_ be getting old, how did he not realise there was someone else in the room--

The chair turned. Sprawled in it was a tall white man in a black t-shirt and combats. He was... a person of strange contrasts, the Count thought. Relaxed, but at the same time coiled to strike. Heavily muscled, yet graceful and lithe in a way not normally found in the strong. He had pale, sharp blue eyes, messy dark hair. A flesh body and a metal arm. He held a baseball bat loosely in his flesh hand, and on his lap rested the new Crepax book.

“I normally get 'Terminator', due to this.” The man raised his metal hand. “And all the murder, of course. But I'm only here to talk. Unless you pull that gun on me, and then things will go downhill very quickly.”

The Count slowly drew the gun and placed it on the drinks trolley. Then he refilled his spilled glass of grappa, pouring himself a good three fingers of the clear, fiery spirit. Unexpectedly meeting other... _individuals_ always gave him a thirst. Especially when they were people he'd had a hit out on earlier in the week. He didn't regret losing the gun, noisy piece of business that it was; he was his mother's child and preferred the stiletto anyhow, coated with a family-recipe poison and sheathed on his right calf.

“May I ask how you got into my study?”

“The same way you get into Carnegie Hall,” the Soldier smiled. “Practice.” He closed the book and laid it gently on the desk.

 _At least he has respect for books_ , the Count thought. _If he had cracked the spine of that new edition, well son, then we could talk about things going downhill._

“Your men are all still alive and your alarms are all still on. Except the ones in this room, of course.”

“That is unusually considerate.”

The Soldier shrugged. “I'm a freelancer. I have no interest in alienating potential future employers. But I do need to know why your family was trying to kill Dazzler and, by extension, me.”

The Count sighed and eased himself into the overstuffed armchair that faced his desk. “We were paid to do the hit. I can't tell you who. It violates the honour of the contract. And I don't know why, because one doesn't ask. You understand.”

“But your contract clearly never specified that Dazzler had protection, otherwise you would have structured that first attempt on Dazzler's life very differently. Would you have asked them for more money if you'd known I was involved?”

“I would not have taken the contract at all,” said the Count, as he sipped his grappa.

“And a contract built upon a lie is no contract at all, and passes outside the code of honour.” The man tapped the end of the baseball bat on the ground, and looked distant, momentarily. “At least in the Irish mob. Maybe your lot work differently.”

“No,” said the Count. “It is the same with us. You were made?”

“Yeah. When I was a kid. White Hand Gang on the Brooklyn waterfront.”

The Count sat forwards on his chair. “Dinny Mehan?”

“Nah. Seamus Lonergan and Eoghan Hart, mostly.” The Soldier held up the bat. “Working protection rackets. Doing some boxing.”

“Ah, I remember Big Seamus. Red hair, red face, broken nose, yes?”

“Yeah, that's the man,” The Soldier grinned. “You don't look old enough to remember him.”

“Neither do you.”

“Fair point.”

The Count came to a decision in his mind and walked over to his drinks trolley again. “Grappa? It is from my own estates. None finer.” He didn't wait for the Soldier's answer to begin pouring. “Seamus was ambitious but not smart enough with it. I had him killed and thrown in the East River in 1952. The Family was based in New York, then,” he said by way of explanation.

“I think Hydra paid you for the hit on Dazzler,” the Soldier said. “Because you said you would have _refused_ the contract. We all know that nobody refuses. You just claim to be busy during the window, or ask for so much money the other party moves on. But Hydra, you would wonder why they don't take care of this themselves. What they know about me that you don't. So instead of asking for more money, you refuse.”

The Count placed the small crystal glass of grappa on the desk in front of the Soldier. “I think you are very clever, for a killer.”

The Soldier picked up the grappa and swirled it, then smelled it.

“It is not poisoned; I give you my word,” said the Count, returning to his chair.

“The two posthumans that came out with your final strike team... the crocodile fella was a mutant, I presume. But who did the work on the other one? The one with the laser cannon in his skull?” The Soldier's voice was light, as if indulging an idle curiosity. He angled the glass, catching sparkles in the crystal from the warm lamplight.

“He was on loan from Hydra.” The Count gestured. “I complained to them; this is what they sent.”

“I see. One last thing, and then I'll leave you to your books. This Chiago Hydra base must be new. Where is it?”

The Count gave him the address, and rose when the Soldier did, extending his right hand to shake. The Soldier smiled at him and extended his left, for he'd seen the small tap the Count had made to his signet ring... a touch that could be a nervous habit, but could also be a trigger to extend a small, poisoned needle from the ring. A needle to pierce a hand.

“Sorry,” the Soldier said, continuing to hold out his left hand during the moment of social awkwardness. “While it would have to be a pretty impressive formula to slow me down, I got poisoned last night and two days in a row just looks sloppy.”

The Count spread his hands. “No, it is I who am sorry. Old habits, you know.”

His eyes slid across to the glass of grappa he had given the Soldier. It was untouched, on the desk.

When he looked back, the Soldier was gone, and the study windows were open.

He sighed, and settled down in his reading chair with the new Crepax book. Tomorrow he would have his head of security killed.

 

* * *

 

JBB: Done with Maggia. Have lead on Hydra involvement. Fuckers paid the mob to try to hit me.

SGR: Ha. Guess they were sick of losing their own people.

JBB: New base. Heading there now.

SGR: BUCKY. NO.

JBB: Steve. I know. I'm just going to do surveillance.

SGR: What could possibly go wrong.

JBB: ONLY. SURVEILLANCE.

SGR: Send me the address of the base, just in case.

JBB: Please do not show up

SGR: I'll only show up if you're gone more than, what

JBB: If I'm not back by the time rehearsal is over. Speaking of which:

JBB: You need to take Alison to rehearsal. Wear my kit; nobody looks at you closely if you wear the mask and goggles. Tac jacket won't fit but black peacoat will. Hood up. Gloves.

JBB: Bring Bettina (98B.)

SGR: Which is the 98B?

JBB: Sigh. The very big sniper rifle. DO NOT FUCK WITH THE SETUP, ROGERS, OR WE WILL HAVE WORDS.

JBB: Just glare at people then go up to the rafters and keep watch. Be paranoid. It helps.

SGR: OK. Be careful.

JBB: You too.

 

* * *

 

Alison padded over to where Steve was lounging on the sitting-room sofa, wrapped up in the novel he was reading on his tablet. “So, um, I'm going to sleep now,” she said.

Steve looked up. She was in gym shorts and a Stax Records t-shirt and had her hair in some sort of silk bonnet. “Okay! Sleep well. See you in the morning.”

“Um...” Alison looked down at the carpet, then back at her bedroom.

Steve looked up from his book again, his face questioning

“Aren't you going to...?” she pointed to the bedroom.

Steve blushed. “Uh.. Pardon me?”

Alison rolled her eyes so hard she thought she glimpsed her own brain for a second. “Bucky stays in my bedroom at night. He sits on the floor and does this freaky thing where he doesn't move _at all_.”

“Oh. Um. I can't do that,” Steve said. “That's a Bucky Special. It'll be fine if I stay out here and read all night. My hearing's not quite as good as his but it's still well beyond normal. You'll be safe. I don't feel comfortable--”

“Look,” Alison said, her voice quavering. “Last night a dozen ninjas snuck into my bedroom to kill me and, blondie, you are going to get over your fee-fees and read your damn book in there with me because--” and here, her voice cracked with the sobs she was holding in-- “because I'm really not over that not even one tiny bit and _please_.”

Steve dropped his tablet and hugged Alison. “Hey. It's okay. I didn't understand. It's okay. I know how awful it is to be scared and alone. It's the worst thing in the world.”

Alison nodded into his shoulder.

Steve pushed her a couple inches away, far enough that he could look her in the eye. “Hey, can you help me with something?”

  
Alison snuffled.

“So I am trying to catch up on things I missed but all my friends have terrible taste in movies. I bet you're much better than them at picking what I should watch. Want to find a movie and watch it with me?”

Alison blushed, and a slow smile spread across her face. “Okay,” she said, tugging at his sleeve. “I hope you like musicals, though.”

“I _love_ musicals.”

And that is how Captain America came to love _Moulin Rouge_ and _Dreamgirls_ (even more spectacular with Dazzler orchestrating a light show during the songs, and coming in on harmonies) _,_ and how Dazzler was introduced to _Shall We Dance_.

Alison drifted off to sleep halfway through the final film, but the line of worry between her brows had smoothed out. Steve eased off the bed and moved to a nearby armchair. He settled in for what remained of the night, shield by his side and novel waiting in his lap, and hoped that Bucky wasn't going to get himself into too much trouble.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter title song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lgCZN1rU5co
> 
> A shorter chapter this week due to still being under all the deadlines. Next week: Steve continues to have a complicated relationship with Bucky's uniform. Bucky continues to have a complicated relationship with Hydra. We find out who the underlying movers are in this game. And, Phil Coulson redeems himself. 
> 
> _Nota bene_ : I am vaguely aware that in proper Marvel continuity, Count Nefaria is an indestructible ionic super-dude. Well, _meh_ to that. I like him better as a slightly grumpy older (yet functionally immortal) Capo with a thing for Italian graphic novels. Oh, and there is a new Guido Crepax book out from Fantagraphics and you should buy it. Oh, and Astaire / Rogers movies are just pure cinematic joy. Start with Shall We Dance, or Top Hat.
> 
>  
> 
> BONUS DELETED SCENE! 
> 
> INT. FAMILY NEFARIA COMPOUND, CHICAGO NORTH SHORE
> 
> BUCKY: So yeah I think we actually worked together once. The Zurich job, about a year ago?
> 
> COUNT NEFARIA: Yes! Miriam never said who--
> 
> *sounds of gunfire; mayhem*
> 
> COUNT NEFARIA: Wha--?
> 
> The study door splinters off its brass hinges as a heavy boot connects with it. A focused, angular white man stalks in, brown eyes rimmed with red, two days of stubble on his face and a 50-calibre machine gun in his hands. A skull t-shirt stretched over a kevlar vest. The man opens his mouth to speak, but stops when he feels the cold muzzle of a handgun against the back of his head.
> 
> BUCKY: Lemme guess. We killed your father and we should prepare to die.
> 
> COUNT NEFARIA: That's Frank Castle. I didn't kill his father. Soldier, did you kill his father?
> 
> BUCKY (to Nefaria): Pfft. Fucked if I can remember. Probably. 
> 
> COUNT NEFARIA: Maybe you killed his grandfather.
> 
> Bucky divests the visitor of his weaponry (which involves some persuading of the metal fist variety, as skull-shirt guy is surly and unco-operative). Then Bucky spins him and propels him towards the door. 
> 
> BUCKY: You. Go home. Grownups are talking here. Come back when you're not shite. 
> 
> FRANK CASTLE: But--
> 
> BUCKY: Jesus, does anybody get decent training in stealth work these days or did they stop that after Glasnost?
> 
> COUNT NEFARIA: I blame _Rambo_ , personally. It's all been downhill since those movies. 
> 
> BUCKY: It's all been downhill since fuckin' _Scarface_. And I'm talkin' the original one. 
> 
> FRANK CASTLE: I'm not leaving until someone tells me who's bringing tainted heroin into Chicago--
> 
> BUCKY: The Albanian mob, asshole. Everyone knows that. Now bye.


	6. Bad Reputation

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Steve suits up as the Winter Soldier to protect Alison, while Bucky infiltrates a Hydra base after not having slept for four days. Because that's a GREAT idea, Bucky.

Steve looked down at the black uniform and equipment scattered across the bed and wiped a hand down his face. He wasn't sure he could _do_ this.

They were leaving for rehearsal in 15 minutes. He _needed_ to do this.

Bucky had been so private about his... work stuff. When they first became lovers, Steve never saw him in uniform. Even when he claimed to be straight off a mission, he'd changed into street clothes and the uniform and weapons (beyond the ones he always wore) were nowhere to be seen. The Winter Soldier was just another thing that Bucky swept behind the big curtain of things that he hid from Steve, nestled in alongside his history with Hydra, and what was really going on in his head that made his eyes occasionally go distant and unfocused, that made him get up in the middle of the night and go away for a while.

And now the Winter Soldier's uniform was laid out on a hotel bed for Steve to put on.

It felt like trespass.

He ran his fingers over the mask, and felt the same shameful, disgusting thrill he always did when confronted with it.

“How are you coming?” Alison's voice came through the door.

Steve silenced the undignified squawk he was close to making and coughed out a “fine; be ready soon.”

“Found out where all the knives go yet? Because seriously I've seen that man wear jeans that don't leave a lot to the imagination and my boyfriend is like why are you staring at your bodyguard's thighs and how do I tell him it's because I know there are six knives strapped to them and I'm trying to figure out wherrrrre they are. Oh, hey, can we stop at Starbucks on the way? I'm fiending for a latte the size of my head.”

“Yeah, I need coffee,” said Steve.

It had gotten better. At first, Steve had been too afraid of spooking Bucky, of saying something that would spur an absence of weeks or even months. Because, Christ, he needed him like an addiction. He was aware it was probably all sorts of unhealthy, but his relationship with Bucky was the one thing he took for himself and if he was being selfish and needy, so be it.

Then one night, he was just so fucking _tired_. He was straight off an Avengers op that had gone to pieces: Barton had almost died, Tony had to be cut out of his suit, and he'd gotten an Atlantean spear straight through his leg. Bucky had climbed through the window of his place in Brooklyn around midnight, all evasions and silences about where he'd been, and Steve had just looked up at him and sighed and said, _you can stop pretending_.

The moment of utter stillness that settled on Bucky made Steve knew he'd hit bullseye. _What do you mean_ , Bucky had said with impressive nonchalance, wandering into the kitchen to get an apple. You'd have to know him a long time to have noticed the slight tightness in his shoulders. Steve had put his head in his hands and said, _Stop it. Stop protecting me from you. You did it in Brooklyn and you did it after Azzano and I never said anything and maybe if I had, everything would have been different. And that's on me. But I've known you your whole life, Buck. And I know all about masks. I put on the blue cowl and I pretend to be Captain America. But you, you take the muzzle off and you pretend to be_ \-- and Steve gestured at Bucky's street clothes-- _you pretend to be this. I used to think maybe you needed it, maybe it was a recovery thing, but now I think you just do it for me. You gotta stop. Fine if you have walls with everyone else but not with me. Not with me, Buck._

Bucky _had_ spooked. Left pieces of crushed apple on the kitchen floor and vanished.

But two weeks later he was back, off something fairly local because the blood wasn't even dry on him. Dumped a bag of weapons, stripped off his tac gear and sat down in a kitchen chair. Never said a word, just handed Steve a little metal box that contained suture thread and needles and bandages, and bent his head so Steve could sew up the nasty gash on his upper back. Didn't move; didn't flinch as the needle went through flesh. Just sat there with that eerie inhuman stillness. Then when Steve was done, Bucky laced his fingers in with Steve's and looked up into his eyes. Steve watched him come back from his mission headspace, watched the light come back into his eyes, watched as he bit his bottom lip and hissed at the pain of the injuries he'd been suppressing. _Yeah, this was a messy one_ , Bucky had said. Steve had kissed him on his forehead and said _thank you_ and then said _go take a shower, you smell like an abbatoir_.

Steve wasn't sure if it was his imagination, but he thought Bucky held him even tighter than usual that night. And if he'd not quite dropped off to sleep by the time Bucky whispered, _what's a poor sinner like me done to deserve an angel like you_ , well, he'd never tell a soul.

There was still the matter of the Avengers, though. His team had been mostly understanding; they'd noticed how much more lightly he carried himself, how much he smiled now. But they'd also stopped inviting him to the occasional post-mission movie nights and drinks that happened at the Tower. He wasn't sure if the subtext was _clearly Steve will be busy_ or if it was _we don't want the Winter Soldier around here_.

It didn't help that Bucky remained very solitary and very paranoid. He wasn't averse to coming to the Tower: the significant power and wiring needs for the labs meant the building was riddled with crawlspaces, dropped ceilings, raised floors. Bucky was able to navigate around the Tower completely out of its public spaces, out of sight of people, ghosting through air vents and elevator shafts.

One of the few times he was there, Steve had suggested they go down to the gym to spar. It was something he'd wanted to do for ages – to see how good Bucky really was; to have a fighting partner with whom he didn't have to hold back. Bucky just gave him a look, mumbling _and have Romanova going frame by frame through Jarvis' footage of us? I don't think so_. So Bucky treated the Tower as his own personal climbing frame while Steve prepped for a mission, and theoretically nobody but Steve knew he was there.

Nobody but Jarvis, of course, and therefore Tony, and because Tony can't keep a secret, everyone. Tony had cornered Steve a few days later in the elevator, short on sleep and temper. _Look, I like the Paranoid Android, I really do, but can he not come back here until he learns to use doors? And until he stops being such a cold fish. Would it seriously kill him to come say hi to me? It's my fucking building._ Bucky must have been riding on top of the elevator at the time, and had overheard Tony. Nobody worked that out until a couple weeks later...

...when the labs started stinking to high hell.

Someone had left a dead fish in every one of the Iron Man suits lying around the Tower. There were quite a few, between in-use versions, betas, mods, and the maintenance queue. You know what's really hard to get out of complex circuitry? The smell of rotting fish.

Bucky was officially banned from the Tower, and Tony upgraded security again. _You should just hire James as a consultant,_ Pepper had said, rolling her eyes at the cost of the security revamp.

Steve had asked Bucky how he'd avoided Jarvis once he was out of the airshafts and into the labs, and Bucky had just smiled, _I didn't_ , and lifted his metal hand and said, _the machines like me because I'm like them_.

The uncomfortable standoff between Bucky and the Avengers bothered Steve. He could tell how starved for friendship Bucky was, how it came out in the moments of shy, quicksilver charm that had people like Alison absolutely devoted to him. How underneath the Winter Soldier there were still echoes of that kid from Brooklyn who was fast with a joke, easy with strangers... but now everything was filtered through threat analysis. Steve knew that this was why Alison and the hair salon girls and the Irish kid who drove for him were okay, and the Avengers weren't. The girls and the driver kid didn't rank as threats.

Maybe this was ultimately why Bucky, until the Fish Incident, got along better with Tony than any other of the Avengers. Tony without his suit wasn't a threat, and Bucky had probably worked out a dozen ways to drop Tony before he got the suit on. Part of him mourned that his friends might never get to see _his_ Bucky, the private one who made terrible jokes and was goofy and smiled all the time and roughhoused him over the back of the sofa at the slightest provocation. The one who trusted. They'd only get to see the wary one.

Steve intended to use his considerable tactical skill to rectify this situation as soon as they had a free moment. To ease Bucky into seeing his team as something other than a collection of miscellaneous threats. Tony was out of the question, until he stopped being mad about the Fish Incident. There was no way on earth Natasha and Bucky would ever do anything other than circle each other like wolves. Sam might try to analyze Bucky. That wouldn't end well. Then Steve remembered he wasn't the only Avenger who was boyfriend to a spy, and he pulled out his phone.

 

SGR: Hey, can I take you out for beer and pizza next week?

CFB: Um... sure?

SGR: Okay, great. Let's say Thursday.

CFB: CAP WHY

SGR: I can't want pizza with a teammate?

CFB: Look dude I am always up for free beer but uh you're not known for being super social

SGR: Maybe I'm trying to change that.

CFB: OK sorry Thursday's cool.

CFB: Wait

CFB: Is this just you or is James coming too, because yeah I dunno if I'm ready for that

CFB: I mean I'm happy for you and all but he freaks me out still

SGR: No just me

CFB: Copy. See ya Thurs. Subway series that night btw. YANKEES!

SGR: Don't make me hurt you, Barton

 

First, Steve admitted to himself as he looked at his phone, he had to make friends with his team, outside work. Stage two would be getting Bucky to trust them. He'd call Sam, too, after this was over. ( _After this was over_. Story of his life.) Sam was curious, and a little worried for Steve. And Steve missed him. Steve would invite him up and warn him that he couldn't talk about therapy at all. (And brace himself for the _look_ that Sam would give him.)

Beyond friendship, there was the question of touch. _Nobody_ touched Bucky. It was partly his preference, and partly the completely reasonable fear that touching Bucky might result in severe injury or death. Steve knew that during Bucky's time with Hydra, touch had always meant pain – both those who touched him (lab techs, handlers, trainers) and those he touched (targets, lab techs, handlers, trainers). Zola had never touched him; never gotten close enough. (Zola was evil, and possibly insane, but he wasn't _stupid_.)

Steve found all this out one night while he was giving Bucky a backrub and Bucky had just casually said, like it was no big deal at all, _y'know, Stevie, you're the first person who's touched me with kindness since I fell..._ then he'd run his hands through his hair and added with a grunt, _pretty much the only one before that, too_. And Steve had to say something, something to keep his heart from shattering, and he'd stuttered out, _I dunno, I think you're forgetting Maggie McDougall_ and Bucky had stilled for a moment then gasped, _I HAD forgotten Maggie McDougall_ , and then he'd leaned into Steve, pressing up against him like a cat, and murmured, _you're a much better kisser than she was_.

Steve realised he'd been staring into the middle distance for a good ten minutes. He threw his phone on the bed and started pulling on the first layer of Bucky's uniform: black kevlar-backed leggings and sleveless shirt very similar to the material used in his own uniform. Then combats, and his own boots (which were brown), and a black hoodie and a peacoat that, Steve noticed, was also lined with a thicker kevlar.

He eyed the approximately 20lbs of ordnance arranged neatly over the bed and wondered for not the first time whether all of it was strictly necessary. Nobody was going to check if his weapons rig was 100% the same as Bucky's...

But then he realised he _wanted_ to feel like Bucky for a day. Feel like what _he_ felt like, walking around.

So he wound the knife and pistol sheaths around his thighs, the small of his back, the tops of his boots. Tucked a few grenades away. Strapped on the uzi between his shoulder blades and became aware that the peacoat had been cut for that, the collar standing away from the back of his neck, so that he could slip it over the holster and still be able to reach down and draw the weapon. The jacket was also just the right length not to get in the way of the thigh holsters.

He put on the mask, then the goggles. They were polarised, strangely restful to wear, and as he put them on he felt a small switch alongside the top of the right lens. He flicked it, and blinked at the sudden green glare of night-vision (painful, in a brightly-lit room), then the primary colours of infrared. The mask smelled of Bucky, and wearing it felt strangely intimate.

Steve walked around, getting accustomed to the kit. It was _silent_. Nothing clinked; nothing jostled. Even the fabric of the combats didn't rustle. He was suddenly aware that his boots creaked a little. Although Steve was taller and broader than Bucky, which threw things off slightly, he was still surprised by how well it all worked. Everything was easily to hand, and without even thinking about it Steve pulled a knife out of a hip sheath and tried to spin it over his fingers.

...which resulted in a knife stuck in the carpet and Steve bashing his knuckles against the mask he'd forgotten he was wearing as he tried to suck on the cut he'd just given himself. Fuck, that knife was sharp.

He re-sheathed the knife, grabbed the big sniper rifle case, and headed out into the main room. Alison was waiting, tapping her fingers, in cute gym leggings and a baggy but clearly very expensive sweatshirt with strange, cryptic markings on it (“it's Hood By Air, they're the _best”_ ).

“What do you think?” Steve asked her, arms spread for effect.

“Shit. That's... pretty good. And freaky,” she said, looking Steve up and down. “But you bounce too much when you walk. Less quarterback. More murder-panther.”

Steve unclipped the mask and grinned. “I'll try to keep it in mind. Now, Starbucks?”

“Yeah! You got the car keys?”

They both stared at each other for a moment, then Alison barrelled past him into Bucky's room, shouting “Dibs! I'm driving! Me me _meeee!_ ” She came out a moment later, waving the keys to the Lamborghini.

Steve pushed the goggles up into his hair and gave Alison his best Captain America Means Serious Business expression. “Do you think he'll actually kill us if we scratch the car, or maybe just torture us for a while?”

Alison froze. “Um.” She tossed the keys over her shoulder at Steve. “You drive.”

_And Natasha said he was no good at manipulation. Ha._

Steve grabbed the keys out of the air, then offered Alison his arm. She took it and looked up at him. “He's gonna be okay, right? I mean, he's not going to do anything crazy-stupid, is he?”

“Bucky?” Steve said, the smile not quite reaching his eyes. “He'll be fine.”

Alison frowned. “Anyone ever tell you that you're a terrible liar?”

“Frequently,” Steve sighed. “Look. He means everything to me, so I worry about him a lot. But he's the Winter Soldier. It's not a mask. It's who he is. He got taken apart down to a molecular level by some of the most evil people in the world and he put himself back together again from nothing and now he is their _worst fucking nightmare_. He'll be fine.”

 

* * *

 

The Winter Soldier was bracing himself between two girders in the space above a dropped ceiling, ten feet above a Hydra scientist in a sub-basement lab hidden under a brownfield site in south Chicago. He'd watched the facility for a few hours, then snuck in at 4am when the dog watch was changing places with the sunrise watch. The building was well and truly bugged at this point, but what he'd seen in this particular lab made him want to stick around and hear a few things for himself. And regret not bringing a fuckton of explosives with him. So he shoved his metal arm against an i-beam and stilled and watched through an air vent as the working day began at Evil Incorporated.

Hydra may have fried his memory on a regular basis at the end, but he never forgot a single face, a single tech or handler that worked on him. This scientist wasn't one of them. She was a woman in her mid-thirties, with frizzy brown hair in a ponytail, brown eyes, freckles on white skin, and she was currently sipping on a venti latte and checking the time on her phone. A lab coat sat over leggings and a pair of hi-top converse.

Her back was to the line of cryo tubes. They were new, and empty.

The table with restraints was off to her right, bright surgical lights and monitors gathered around it like relatives at last rites.

She tucked her phone into her pocket as a wall screen in front of her blinked on.

“Good morning, Sara,” said an older man who Bucky also didn't recognise. The camera he'd placed next to the grate would be recording his face; Bucky would analyse it later. It was probably a scrambler anyway; a CGI face meant to conceal identity. Compartmentalisation.

“Hail Hydra,” said the scientist.

“Hail Hydra. I need an ETA on the new team of Fists. We have been indulgent with your vision, Sara, but without results we will reassign you. We have other promising projects to counteract the Avengers. As does AIM, and we shall not let them get there first.”

_Fucking Hydra. This was a classic modus operandi for them: take someone else's great idea and make it shit._

The scientist immediately went into pacification mode. “It's coming. We have an _almost_ workable version of the serum again. It's only short-term, but it's enough to get the volunteers over the mods. It burns out after a few weeks, though, and the first batch of subjects have not been successful in combat trials. We still can't work out how Erskine and Zola bound the serum permanently to the subjects' DNA.”

“You can't just keep dosing the subjects every few weeks? It would certainly help maintain loyalty, if they have to come to us for the drugs,” the older man said.

“That's the interim plan. I just wish... I wish I had Dr Zola's notes. What happened to them?”

_I did, motherfuckers._

“They were lost. Proceed without them. We approve the plan of continued drug application. Dr Zola's serum was fatal to 99% of its test subjects. It was so toxic, he wouldn't even take it himself to prolong his life when he was dying of cancer. A non-fatal temporary serum is preferable, so long as it is _reliable_.”

The scientist huffed and paused, choosing her words. “I have concerns about long-term reliability, actually. If the serum isn't binding to DNA, then there is always the potential of the subjects building up a tolerance, or of paradoxical reactions under times of extreme stress. We could burn out the new Fists in less than a year. Even if we move to simpler, more weaponised mods, the investment in technology and training--”

_You have no idea why I actually worked, do y--_

“--Do it,” interrupted the man. “Although I have little to thank the Winter Soldier for, his increasing visibility in the public eye has gifted us with a massive pool of volunteers. A lot of our younger generation want to be the next Asset.”

_FUCK EVERYTHING._

The scientist's eyes went a bit distant. The Soldier recognised that look; he'd seen it on Tony's face when he was discussing a piece of robotics he particularly admeired. “It was a fantastic piece of bioengineering. And we made it work for so long. That's what gives me hope for this project. If we start with Hydra loyalists, we won't run into the same... issues.” She sucked in a deep breath. “There's no possibility we can capture it? Get a blood sample, anything? If I can sequence the Asset's DNA--”

_NO._

“--it could advance my serum research by lightyears. It's even in Chicago right now, working for an AIM shell company.”

_Ohhhhh._

“Hydra is no longer expending resources on reclaiming the Asset,” replied the man, checking a watch.

“However...” the man smiled, a horrible, predator's smile. “Perhaps we don't have to. Leave it to me. Hail Hydra.”

The screen blinked off.

The scientist sat down heavily in a wheeled chair and kicked back, scooting across the cement floor. “What did you suspect, Arnim?” she said to herself as the chair spun in a lazy arc, her legs out like a little girl on a swing. “Why did your serum work so well, precisely once? Why did _that_ subject survive, but no other?”

_I asked myself that question every goddamn day, lady. Only answer I could ever figure out didn't involve science at all._

She tilted her head back in the chair, facing up to the ceiling. If her eyes had been open, she would have been looking straight at the Soldier, invisible in the shadows behind the air vent. In a quiet voice, she said, “Something was hinky with the Asset's DNA, before Dr Zola even started. I'd bet my PhD on it. ”

“Dr Reinhardt?” A lab tech stuck his head through the door. “Our first volunteer is ready.”

The scientist stood up and tugged down her lab coat. “Bring him in.”

A team of lab techs filed in around a young white guy, maybe 21, a little ex-military in his bearing. He was missing a leg, below the knee. His warm brown eyes were full of hope and excitement. He smiled when he saw the table, and hopped up on it willingly as the scientist approached and techs started taking vitals.

“Now, Jonathon, is it? Welcome to the Program. Let me tell you what to expect--”

_Phenomenal pain, and if you're lucky, death._

The Soldier had to use every bit of his monumental self-control _not_ to drop throught the ceiling and kill everyone in the room. He crept quietly back to the main airshaft opening and pulled himself up, rolling his shoulders in to fit into the tight space. He had to leave and he had to leave right now, before his brain went into a complete tailspin.

_There is no way you can save that kid. He walked in there. He believes their shit. You can't save him. He'll just walk in again somewhere else and you'll blow the whole operation. You can't save him. FUCK._

The Soldier slipped out of the vent system into an unused part of the factory site. The building was being fake-renovated to allow a plausible excuse for trucks to come and go, for the whole complex to be fenced off by plywood from the street. But the back part was still broken glass and used condoms and bad graffiti, windows flapping torn plastic sheeting in the breeze. The Soldier crouched down under one of the windows, lifted the goggles for a moment and rubbed the bridge of his nose with gloved fingers. He needed to find something he could punch into oblivion. But first, he needed to cross the stretch of waste that separated him from exiting the compound; get back to where his bike was hidden about ten blocks away behind some dumpsters. Not as easy to cross the waste space to the plywood fence in the indifferent sunlight of 10am, versus the pre-dawn darkness of 4am. Guards patrolled the perimeter, and there were at least two guards with rifles on the roof.

He could wait them out until night-time, but the longer he stayed here, the more likely the op was going to go from Just Surveillance to another stop on the James Barnes Vengeance Tour. The risks were too high, though. He was tired; still wounded from his fight with the Hand. Operational efficiency was fine for stealth work but not for taking on an entire Hydra base with only three pistols and a bunch of knives. Not when there was a scientist itching to get a sample of his blood.

He flicked the switch on the small remote charge he'd laid in a similarly disused room on the far side of the building, igniting a small trash fire underneath a smoke detector. The alarm rang out and the foot soldier he could see did what patrols do when they hear an alarm: jogged towards it. He could only hope the roof guards were doing the same, as he hurdled through the window and ran across the waste land with his full, enhanced speed. He twisted into a roll as he reached the plywood fence, slid under it--

\--and scared the living hell out of the Hydra guard having a smoke break on the other side. _This top-secret evil lab is a smoke-free premises_ , apparently.

The Soldier pushed up onto his metal arm and had broken the man's neck between his thighs before he had a chance to scream.

Now he had a dead body on an op that was supposed to leave no trace of his presence. Hydra couldn't know a guard had gone missing. They'd sweep the entire base and all his carefully-laid surveillance equipment would be ferreted out.

He picked up the man's headset, pressing his back against the plywood so he couldn't be seen from the roof. Read the nametag on the guard's uniform. Flicked on the comms. “Yo, it's Kozlowski. What's the alarm? Anything I need to come back for?”

“Nah man, you're good,” said the voice on the other end. “Someone was sneaking a smoke in the building and it lit some trash off.”

“Eh. Hey, I think I'm gonna knock off early, if it's okay. I ate that hummus in the break room fridge for breakfast and I think it was bad.”

“Hahaha, you fuckin' idiot, Koz. You gonna puke, man?”

“All signs point to yes.”

“Dude, go home. Don't forget to swipe out, though.”

“Okay, thanks.”

The Soldier turned off the comm and tucked it away in a pocket. Potentially useful for another day. He looked down at the corpse of the middle-aged man at his feet.

Time to dispose of a dead body.

 

* * *

 

“Just lay off me and let me do my thing!” Alison screamed at the scrawny older man sitting in a seat in front of the stage. They were on what seemed like their 50th rehearsal of “Victory Song”, the big VR showpiece song for the concert.

From what Steve can tell, high up in the rafters and bored out of his mind, the old guy and his lookalike are brothers who run Cadence, the company sponsoring the concert. They have very specific ideas what Dazzler's light show should look like during the song. Alison, very clearly, thinks they have no taste at all. The song is poppy and upbeat, with some weird scratchy atonal bits and lots and lots of flashing lights. Steve is very glad for Bucky's goggles – the one time he tried to watch the light show without them, he got an almost instant migrane. Alison was right; the pace of flashing and the colour sequences that the old men wanted was too fast, too harsh.

Alison and the old men had a close argument that, from what Steve's hearing could pick up, was the usual disagreement between art, which wanted to be free, and commerce, which wanted to get what it paid for. Alison stood on the edge of the stage, arms on hips, tiny and furious.

Steve glanced across the stadium, the sniper rifle cradled by his side. Then a creak over the stage, in the lighting rig, caught his eye. He had a photographic memory and he didn't recognise that lighting tech. The man looked like he was unclipping a set of lights, a huge heavy three-light rig, hung right over the edge of the stage--

“Hands up! Stop what you're doing!” Steve shouted, raising the sniper rifle to his cheek.

The man smiled and put his hands up.

He held a pin in one hand.

The lights fell.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter title song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5RAQXg0IdfI 
> 
> Not many notes today because ugh, deadlines. HUGS! Probably two chapters left, unless I go on a big tangent like I sorta did in this one and then it'll be three chapters.
> 
> Also I accidentally started on Part 3 of the Murder Ballads series already ("I'm Friends With The Monster") because my brain held me hostage and forced me to write 7k of Bucky and the Avengers vs dinosaurs. Derp. So that's there if you want it.


	7. My War

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> As the night of Dazzler's concert approaches, everything goes wrong.

Four hunded odd pounds of stage lighting and tresses are falling from 160 feet in the air towards 100-odd pounds of girl, accelerating at 32 feet per second squared. How soon will it be until the girl is squished to a pulp?

Steve's brain spins. He always hated math.

For a split second all he can think about is throwing himself after the lights: tackling them; tackling Alison, _anything_. His hand brushes back for his shield until he remembers it's not there. That he's wearing Bucky's uniform, standing in for the Winter Soldier to protect Dazzler while Buck chases down leads on who is behind these assassination attempts. That nothing he is wearing is familiar and he does not know what to do except hurl himself at the problem--

Then his hand brushes past the holster on his right hip and he remembers the gun in there fires a grappling hook _in case you fall off the rafters, punk_ , and he grabs it in smooth instinctive motion and thumbs the safety then fires--

(He hopes it's not too late. He knows time can be elastic; you can have a thousand thoughts and find that barely a second has elapsed, or you can have just a couple and suddenly hours have passed. You can have just one, _not without you_ , and seventy years have passed.)

The hook tangles in the support tresses and Steve braces himself on the narrow i-beam, two hundred feet above the stage, as the line goes taught. It swings barely a foot over Alison's head, metal groaning with stress at the sudden stop, electric cabling whipping through the air. A magenta filter jars off the front of a light and crashes to the ground at Alison's feet.

She is frozen, hunched over, one arm held up as if her forearm could block the weight coming down on her. Her pretty face is still with panic as the steel and glass monstrosity swings above her. Steve realises everyone is screaming, yelling, everyone except the two of them. Roadies run out from the wings, grabbing her, pulling her backwards.

Steve pulls up on the line, trying to move the lights away from her, but the line isn't well balanced in the middle and the whole lighting tress tips to the side, one end clanging onto the stage, smashing up a line of monitors. More roadies and crew run out, taking the weight of the tress gradually, and lowering it down.

He is able to drop the line. He looks down idly at his hands, thankful for the gloves he had to wear to preserve the illusion that he was Bucky. The leather is burned through on the palms, where the steel-core grappling line pulled through his hands as he tried to halt the fall of the lighting unit. He stuffs the now-useless gun in a pocket and runs along the I-beam, shouting down, “The saboteur is still in the building! Backstage stairs!” He remembers to drop his voice into an approximation of Bucky's sandpaper growl.

He can hear the man's feet going down the steel ladder from the lighting catwalks and the guy is too far, even with Steve's speed, and Steve once again considers just hurling himself at the problem but them music cuts on the system, LOUD, God it's so loud and sudden Steve almost loses his balance and then there is a flash of white light that goes up the catwalk ladder like a V2 going off and Steve almost loses his balance in the other direction and he watches the saboteur fall off the ladder onto the ground with a THUD and Alison, he realises it's Alison, she is right there where he landed and she is _mad as hell_ and has a bass guitar cocked over her shoulder and Steve decides not to hurl himself at the problem, he'll just do a Bucky and land silently next to the problem (or actually dammit land so hard the floor shook and everyone within 50 feet turned around) and lay a hand on Dazzler to try to convince her not to go all _London Calling_ on the saboteur on the floor, much as he might deserve it.

Steve couldn't trust his voice, couldn't be loud enough over the music to be heard and still do a decent approximation of Bucky, so he just shook his head at Dazzler and grabbed the semi-conscious saboteur and threw him over his shoulder.

Dazzler let down the bass guitar and looked annoyed. She leaned in close. “My dressing room's the third on the right, past the green room. You can use that.”

  
Steve touched his temple in salute and took the guy, who was now shivering, through the warren of backstage rooms to Dazzler's own. He threw him down on the ground and then paused. What would Bucky do?

Steve grinned to himself under the mask. He pulled out black fighting knives into each hand, ostentatiously, and glared at the saboteur.

The guy fell apart faster than wet toilet paper. He looked at his reflection in Bucky's goggles and cringed, whining “I'm so sorry! I'm so sorry! I didn't realise it was you! Please don't kill me!” He started crying, and shivering harder. “I left! I left, just like you. I put Hydra behind me. You gotta understand, you gotta feel for me, I left too!”

Steve tilted his head to the side. It was another Bucky move, his nonverbal shorthand for _you have got to be kidding me, pal_. (Also for _really, Rogers? You REALLY thought that was a good idea?_. It was a gesture with many nuances depending on accompanying facial expression, most of which were currently impossible due to mask and goggles.) The guy saw it and cringed back so hard he nearly turned himself inside out. “I- I couldn't find another job and th-they said they just needed one job done, said it would be simple, motherfuckers never said I'd be going up against _you_ \--”

Steve stepped forwards into the guy's space and he cringed again, curling up into a ball. “I have kids, please,” he sobbed. This was enough, Steve thought, as he raised his hand and konked the guy on the head with the hilt of the knife in his right hand. With one final, snot-streaming gasp, the guy passed out. Steve cable-tied his arms and legs and, as he walked back towards the stage area, pulled out his phone.

 

SGR: You still in Chicago? I have a Hydra freelancer for you. Can you come collect from United Center?

PC: Yes. We'd be happy to.

 

Steve braced himself for a follow-up text from Phil to the effect of, “Had a chance to talk with your friend yet?” but it never came. And Steve would never know if Phil was planning to bring it up in person, since he sent a couple sparks from the lighting crew (justly furious someone had messed with their domain) to guard the saboteur and take care of the handover to Phil.

(He did briefly think about pranking Phil, by showing up in the Winter Soldier's uniform and playing along with Phil's earnest entreaties about the delights of New SHIELD, but that seemed fundamentally mean-spirited. Plus, Bucky would either find it hilarious, or kick him out a window, and he really wasn't sure which it would be.)

 

* * *

 

Rehearsal doesn't run late. It's the night before the big concert so everyone is ordered to go home, go to sleep early, and be in for a final run-through in the morning with full tech and new lights. Steve and Alison pile back into the car around seven, and Steve immediately discards the muzzle, goggles, and more accessible holsters and guns into a duffel bag he found in the back seatwell. He wiped his face with a big hand and sighed in relief.

“Happy to be you again?” Alison asked with a smile.

“Yeah. It was... interesting, but... yeah.” Steve looked over at her. “Happy for this to be almost over?”

“I dunno. Cadence are micromanaging the shit out of me and so this whole thing has gone from being something I was artistically really proud of, to something where I feel all I'm doing is reacting to their notes and it's all a jumbled mess. I feel like I don't have a handle on my own material any more.” She sighed, buckling her seatbelt before leaning back and closing her eyes. “I keep fighting them, but Calvin just keeps saying yes to whatever they want and now he's got this big contract and... I'm really happy for him, but he's not backing me up at all. It's like everything I do is just making me fade and him become more important. This all started because of _my_ music and _my_ talent and now it's about everyone else.”

Steve pulled out of their parking space and turned the sports car to the exit of the parking garage. “There's always conflict between art and commerce. I used to draw. I was going to be an artist, you know? Until the war happened. Only thing I ever got paid for was painting signs. Nobody ever paid me to paint what I wanted. But also, they couldn't take it away from me. The sign work would pay my share of rent and pay for the paints, and then I went home at night and painted things for me.”

He hung a right, heading back down towards their hotel. “What I guess I'm saying is, your talents are all yours, and they can never take away your ability to create unless you let them. Smile, take their money, use them as much as they use you, then go home at night and do things that are just for you.”

I'm going to miss you guys,” said Alison, looking out at the Chicago sunset. “I dunno how the mass-murdering assassin became the best part of this whole thing, but somehow he did.”

“Yeah,” said Steve fondly. “He kind of sneaks up on you like that.”

Then Steve realised what he said and he and Alison looked at each other in shock.

“Was that deliberate? Because it was terrible,” Alison glared at Steve. “So, SO terrible.”

“I dunno,” Steve said, snickering. “I thought it was kind of 'armless, myself.”

Alison groaned theatrically and slumped down in her seat. “I AM DYING. RIP Dazzler, survived a hojillion assassination attempts, only to be slain by Captain America's dad jokes.”

 

* * *

 

Bucky is crashed out face-down on the sofa when they get back to the hotel suite, all rumpled in sweatpants and a black t-shirt, hair a mess. There are empty food plates on most available surfaces. One pale-blue eye watches them come in, and a metal hand waves vaguely towards the plates. “There's cake,” he murmurs. “Somewhere. There _was_ cake.”

Then another blue eye opened and Bucky squinted balefully at them. “Steve. Brown boots with black? Really?”

“I'm going to change,” Alison said, skritching Bucky on the head with her fingernails as she went past. “Don't do anything gross in here.”

Bucky flipped her a metal bird and she just cackled at him.

Steve rolled his eyes and sat down on the coffee table next to the sofa. “How was the mission?”

“Eh,” grunted Bucky, nesting further into the pillows he'd heaped on the sofa. “On the one hand, that Hydra base now has more bugs than a Bowery flophouse. On the other hand, it's a very good thing alcohol doesnt work on me because I'd like to drink myself into oblivion.”

“You want to talk about it?”

“Maybe later. Don't want to dredge it up again right now. How was your day as me?”

Steve pushed his feet into Bucky as he leaned over to unlace his boots. “Had another assassination attempt. Freelancer for Hydra. Caught him and he took one look at the uniform and just about wet himself. I didn't have to say a thing. Just pulled out a knife and the guy spilled everything.”

Bucky hummed contentedly. “The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting,” he mumbled.

Alison's voice sounded from the next room. “Sun Tzu? Really?”

Then, when she was met with silence, she stuck her head out her bedroom door. “What? I went to college.”

“I didn't,” grinned Steve.

“Liar! You took some art classes at the Cooper Institute! I didn't even finish high school,” Bucky said, reaching a hand down to pull Steve's boots off. “But fuck me, do middle management at evil organizations love quoting shit like Sun Tzu. I can do most of von Clausewitz in the original, too.”

“Please don't,” said Steve.

Bucky threw a boot at him.

Steve pointed a finger at Bucky, his face a half-successful attempt at stern. “Do not start.”

Bucky grinned a Cheshire-cat grin and stretched on the sofa, his t-shirt riding up over his abs. “You wanted me to sleep. Now you suffer the consequences--”

Then Alison screamed, her yell of terror and surprise echoing hollowly against the hard tiled surfaces of her bathroom.

Bucky was narrowly through her bedroom door in front of Steve before he remembered, squawked “Oh shit! Sorry, Alison,” and started laughing so hard he had to sit down on the floor.

Steve stood in a fighting stance in the middle of the room, looking back and forth between Bucky howling with laughter on the floor and Alison, her face furious, stomping out of the bathroom.

“BUCKY! WHY IS THERE A DEAD NAKED PERSON IN MY BATHTUB?!”

“Sorry, m'forgot to mention, m'gonna dispose of that later. Hydra,” he said, his laughter quieting to giggles. “Mook saw me, had to disappear him.”

“WHY IS IT IN _MY_ BATHTUB? You have your own bathroom. Where YOUR THINGS go. Which includes dead people now, apparently.”

“Because... I... wanted... to... shower... in.... mine?”

“And WHY is there also CAKE in my bathroom?”

“I... got hungry? While I was stripping him down.”

“UGH.” Alison turned her basilisk glare on Steve. “He's not actually housetrained, is he?”

“No. Sorry. Didn't they warn you?” Steve said, wrinkling his nose in apology, which was adorable for all of two seconds until Bucky swept a leg out and knocked Steve onto the floor too.

Alison growled and made a flicking motion with her fingers at Bucky, surrounding him with little sparks of multicoloured light. “I liked you better when you were strung out on no sleep,” she grumped.

“On the plus side, I think I know why everyone's trying to kill you,” Bucky said, tracking the coloured lights with his right hand.

 

* * *

 

They ordered in. Bucky was doing something probably highly illegal on his laptop, and Steve and Alison sat on the floor around the coffee table and consumed pizza while they both waited for him to finish. With a quiet, “bingo, there you are,” he smiled, then shut the laptop case and joined them on the floor.

They looked at him expectantly. “Cadence is an AIM shell company,” he said. “It's really well hidden, but it tracks back to AIM eventually via a Finnish subsidiary. The Hydra surveillance tipped me off to that,” Bucky smiled grimly.

“Of course AIM do some legit stuff, but I doubt this is one of them. Something big is going to happen at the concert, something that the other major organisations don't want to happen because it'll put AIM ahead of them in the shitty, horrible arms race they have. That's why all the knives at our backs.”

“The light sequences! That's why they've been micromanaging me,” snarled Alison.

“Yeah,” Bucky said. “I have a nasty feeling it's some sort of sleeper code or mind control. All those free Virtual Reality glasses... and parts of Calvin's samples...” Bucky's face twisted and he looked away. Steve reached a hand out to squeeze his knee, but Bucky pulled back and crossed his arms. “Let's just say that certain frequencies work better for implanting things in human minds and that song uses a bunch of them.”

“So what do we do?” said Alison.

“We play along,” said Bucky, moving the fingers of his metal hand in odd patterns, forcing the arm plates to recalibrate over and over again in a way that emphasised the sinister, alien nature of his prosthetic. “Too late to do anything else. Play along, and then tomorrow night just... don't do the thing they want with the lights. Do your own thing. If they come after you for it, they'll have to go through me.”

“And me,” said Steve. “Meanwhile, you have an early version of the song? A pre-Cadence version? Maybe we can swap it out on Calvin's laptop.”

“I do,” Alison smiled. “He'll be stage right, behind his tower. You'll see where at final run-through, tomorrow.” Then Alison put her fist out, over the pile of pizza cartons on the coffee table. “Go team?”

Steve put his fist on hers, then Bucky added a metal fist. “Go team,” Steve said.

“Now,” Alison said, with a little too much emphasis, “I'd like to take a _shower_.”

Bucky's eyes widened. “Oh yeah. Just a sec.” He grabbed a large, empty black duffel bag from his room, then padded through into her room.

Steve leaned forwards and put his hands over Alison's ears. “Trust me,” he said softly.

Several sickening cracks and snaps later, Bucky came back with the duffel bag, no longer empty, and headed straight out the door. “Back in 20,” he mumbled.

 

* * *

 

Alison was preparing for bed, and Steve and Bucky had a few minutes to themselves before Bucky needed to guard Alison for the night. Steve had the look on his face like he wanted to have a serious discussion about something but isn't sure Bucky will be receptive to it, and finally Bucky rolled his eyes and groaned, “Just say it, Rogers.”

It still took Steve almost a full minute. Then, deep breath, and he said, “You don't have to--”. He paused again, changing his tack. “What are you thinking of doing about the Hydra base?”

To his surprise, Bucky shrugged, and said, “I don't know.”

Bucky's voice dropped to a whisper, small and confessional, as he pressed his palms to his eyes: “They're doing it again, Steve. Trying to fix Zola's serum. That's what's going on there. Part of me wants to raze that base to the fucking ground, leave it a smoking crater. But part of me is just so fucking _done_.”

“Hey,” Steve said. “Are you going to have a space issue if I hug you?” Bucky could go from extremely tactile and affectionate to jackknifing across the room to get away from touch, depending on his ever-changing mood. Discussion of Hydra was pretty much guaranteed to make any attempt at physical proximity a game of Russian roulette.

Bucky thought for a moment, then shook his head, and inched a bit closer to Steve. Steve slung his big arms around his friend and rested his chin on Bucky's metal shoulder. “You don't have to be personally responsible for Hydra, Buck. It's not your fault you survived. Your war has to end sometime.”

Bucky leaned his head against Steve's. “I want it to end.”

They just held each other for a while, until Bucky whispered, “I still don't know why I survived.”

Steve smiled. “Too stubborn to die?”

Bucky poked him in the ribs. “Plenty of guys stronger and more stubborn than me never came out of that lab.” He exhaled, a bone-weary admission of mysteries he might never understand. “The scientist at the Hydra lab wants my blood. Thinks I have something weird about my DNA that made the serum work with me but nobody else.”

“Maybe you're a mutant.”

“Doesn't that hit at puberty?” Bucky asked. “I think we would have noticed. I think _Charles Xavier_ would have noticed when he was in my head.” Then Bucky snorted out a laugh. “Imagine if I'd had some sort of cool mutation. If I had grown wings when I was sixteen. We could have flown away.”

“We still can.”

Bucky looked at Steve for a long time. “I'd like that. Not forever. But for a little while.”

“You don't have to take that base down, Bucky.” Steve nudged him. “Besides, you've got your reputation to consider. People might start mistaking you for a hero.”

The baleful glare he got from Bucky made the comment 100% worth it, Steve thought.

“I don't want you doing it either, Steve. Don't want them getting _your_ blood.”

Oh. _That_ was the reason for the baleful glare.

Bucky wiggled his way out of Steve's grasp and lay down on the floor a couple feet away. Touching was over for now, obviously.

“They're never going to stop. There's always some bright young spark who decides that humans can be made into better killing machines, whether they agree to it or not. The funny thing is, they're all so focused on the augmentations. But as probably one of the world's biggest experts on the subject, _this_ \--” and Bucky taps his own head “--is the weapon. This--” he waves a hand over his body, “--is just the delivery mechanism.” He smiled at Steve, an ugly, hollow smile. “I take a perverse kind of comfort in the fact they're probably never going to be cruel enough over a long enough period of time again to make anyone terribly effective.”

“I wish they wouldn't try at all.”

“No shit. They brought in this kid, clearly a vet, missing part of a leg... looked so hopeful when they spun their lies at him. I nearly blew the whole damn mission right there,” Bucky said.

Steve swallowed. “SHIELD,” he said.

“NO,” Bucky growled.

“The new group is good. They're small. I trust Coulson,” Steve said. “Also, nobody there has blood that could be remotely useful to the Hydra scientists.”

Bucky looked at Steve through narrowed eyes.

“Think of it as a test. Pass them the surveillance, see if they do a good job,” Steve offered.

“If they don't, I'll kill them. Pass _that_ on to Coulson.”

“Okay.”

“Fine.”

Alison stuck her head out, her hair up for the night in its silk scarf. “Turning in now,” she said.

Bucky grunted and back-somersaulted onto his feet, padding in after her to begin his night sentry duty.

Steve went to bed by himself in Bucky's room, hoping that the smell of Bucky on the sheets would keep the nightmares away, that the distant rattle of the El wouldn't loom and twist in his mind into something monstrous, something screaming and white and red and blue.

 

* * *

 

Steve pads out in the morning to find Bucky half-naked and silently stretching out after his night of stillness. Specifically, he walks into the main living area as Bucky leans backwards into a handstand then, from there, flows into some sort of complicated upside-down split and then rotation. It doesn't help Steve's morning wood situation at all.

Alison walks out eating a handful of grapes from the fruit basket in her room, shoots Bucky a bored look, and throws a grape at his head. Which Bucky catches, because he is a jerk. She then lobs one at Steve, which he also catches, because he won't be outdone.

She fishes a flash drive out of her pocket. “This is the old version of the song, without all the weird remix stuff,” she said, handing it to Steve.

Bucky flips back to standing. “I guard the girl, you swap the song?” he says, looking over at Steve.

“Sounds good. What's the plan for the rest of today?

“Concert's at eight. We have to be there by six. But we also have a final run-through this morning, 10-1, then there's usually a thank-you thing for the crew,” Alison explained.

“Excellent. I'll go to the Art Institute in the morning, then see you guys back here around 3?”

Alison made Steve promise to pick her out a nice card from the museum's gift shop that she could send her mom, and while they were eagerly discussing art and what sort of painting her mom might like best, Bucky went to suit up.

Steve came in just as Bucky was almost finished, and made sure the last thing he felt before putting the mask on was Steve's lips on his. Once the mask was on, Steve traced his fingers down the hard planes of it, from nose to chin and across Bucky's cheeks.

“You getting used to this? I thought you hated it,” Bucky said, his voice slightly muffled. He caught Steve's fingers and twined them in with his metal ones.

Steve bit his lip. “I have mixed feelings about it,” he said finally.

“Uh-huh,” said Bucky, palming Steve's semi and eliciting a moan as he brushed past him, “Part of you seems to have very clear feelings about it. See you later.”

“Jerk.”

 

* * *

 

Alison is on her best behaviour for the final run-through, and the twins from Cadence, Waldemar and Yurgon Tykkio, are delighted with her. Not as delighted as they are with Calvin, who is signing a contract to produce an entire dance album funded by Cadence. The songs from it play on a loop whenever Dazzler's set list isn't playing.

Bucky lurks in the rafters and prowls backstage like a ghost, his mood heading southwards as the loud music starts eating away at the edges of his mind, bringing up the sort of headache he hasn't had since immediately after he gained his freedom in DC. He takes photos of the stage layout and of Calvin's setup for Steve. He avoids people, especially Calvin, who still treats him like some object of curiosity that he can go annoy whenever he feels like. He feels it might be bad politics to backhand Alison's sorta-maybe-on-the-rocks producer boyfriend across the stage so soon before the concert. It's tempting, though.

Things get worse at the crew party immediately following rehearsal wrapping. The music gets louder, and certain repetitive frequencies feel like needles stabbing into Bucky's head. The muzzle and the goggles block the rest of his heightened senses from occasionally being overwhelmed, but there's nothing he can do about his hearing. He feels shivery; on a hair trigger.

Everyone crowds onto the stage: backup dancers, band, tech crew, roadies, Cadence execs. There's champagne, toasting both Alison and Calvin. And a huge cake, done cleverly as a pile of LPs and awards. Bucky smells it, and can't detect any poison. This many people, this close to Alison, and Bucky can't watch from the rafters. He has to be right down by her side. The jostling of the people, the smells of them, the noise, all the goddamn _noise_ : it takes everything he has to keep his hands free of weapons.

Calvin thinks it would be hilarious if Bucky cuts the cake, because knives. He's a little drunk already and he grabs Bucky's arm, tries to shove him towards the cake. One of Calvin's entourage grabs his other arm. Alison is talking to a gaggle of backup dancers and doesn't notice.

And Bucky has to tap out before he flips out.

He yanks free of Calvin and his friend, and he tries to be careful but his calibration of _careful_ right now is getting more fucked up by the second and Calvin's friend goes flying into the backup dancers and Calvin yells, “what the _fuck_ , man?” in Bucky's face and tries to shove him again and Alison notices but is too busy helping her friends get back to their feet and Bucky stalks out.

He just needs to go outside and breathe for a minute. Then he'll go back up to the rafters with the sniper rifle. He needs fresh air and nobody touching him or near him and the noise to stop just for one goddamn minute.

He is three feet from the backstage emergency exit – from _relief_ – when he feels a presence next to him.

The presence does not try to touch him, thank buggering Christ.

It's Waldemar Tykkio, the Cadence (and therefore AIM) exec who hired him to protect Alison. A whip-thin, gnarled man in his sixties, with grey eyes that were sharper than some of Bucky's knives. He motioned Bucky into a storage area, full of flats and backdrops and spare filters and lights. His brother Yorgon, a little younger and stockier, is waiting.

The music if anything is louder in the storage area, echoing off all the hard surfaces. Waldemar smiles. His teeth are perfect, the teeth of a man in his twenties. “We're relieving you of your contract, Soldier. You'll be paid for the rest of your contracted time, but we don't need you any more. We have resolved the threats to Alison's life by other means.”

Bucky tilts his head and glares at them. The fuck? “You're joking, right?”

“I'm afraid not. You may leave, Soldier. Stand down,” says the brother, his voice eerily modulated. There's something off about it but his head is throbbing from the loud music and he can't quite get his thoughts together--

“I prefer not to. I will work out my contract,” he grits out.

“I'm afraid that's not possible,” says Waldemar, and Bucky realises his voice is odd too. He's never been close enough to the two of them that he can get a read on them, where is their heartbeat, why can't he hear it--

Then he feels a prick at the back of his neck, between his mask and the collar of his tac jacket. The stabbing, freezing pain that flows through his veins is all too familiar--

Waldemar continues, his smile growing. “See, _you_ were the price of ending the attempts on Alison's life.”

Bucky knows he only has seconds before the neurotoxin renders him useless and he turns and rips off Yorgon Tykkio's arm, the hand still holding the needle used to inject Bucky--

And the brothers only laugh at him, horrible, tinny, modulated laughter, as Bucky looks at the arm in his hands, sees the sparks coming from it, the wires and servomotors and the coolant that is pouring out over his hands.

Bucky turns to run but stumbles and falls, his body shutting down, not responding, locking him into neuroparalysis while his brain goes into frantic, trapped overdrive.

That is, until the pipe wielded by one of the two androids connects with his head and everything goes black.

 

* * *

 

Alison keeps glancing around for Bucky, and becomes increasingly uneasy when he doesn't reappear. She wants to go look for him but she can't go two feet in any direction without someone stopping her, for a hug or to say how they excited they are or to introduce themselves or say what her music means to them. This should be a great day. This should be a fun party. And she hates having a security detail, always has. So why are her nerves screaming because she can't lay eyes on her bodyguard? She pointedly looks up at the rafters and raises an eyebrow, and waits for the inevitable text message, _don't worry, still here_.

It never comes.

Instead, Waldemar Tykkio appears at her elbow. “We had some information on a threat to you, and we've borrowed your bodyguard to look into it,” he says apologetically.

“Oh,” Alison blinks. “Will he be back soon? Who's going to drive me home?” she says, the idea of Bucky being gone so unexpected that she can only seize on the most trivial considerations.

“I'll drive you home, baby,” says Calvin, his arm winding around her waist. He's glassy-eyed with champagne and maybe something else, and he licks a stripe up her cheek. Alison has to steel herself not to pull away. He links his other arm around her and breathes in her ear as he pulls her hip into his crotch. “I got a dope new ride now. Signing gift from Cadence,” and he winks at Waldemar. “Wanna see?”

He pulls out his phone and shows her a photo of a yellow Ferrari convertible with a big bow on it. “It cost twice as much as James' car,” he puffs proudly.

 

* * *

 

Bucky wakes up on a metal table because of course he does. He recognises the lab coat and frizzy brown ponytail of the Hydra scientist chick, silhouetted in the light leaning over him. She has a drill in her hand and he thinks the buzzing sound of it is what finally cut through the fog of his unconsciousness. They've left his goggles and mask on, so can't tell that he's opened his eyes. The rest of his kit is gone, and all his clothes except his underwear. He is strapped down, heavily.

He estimates it's a couple hours since he was injected with the neurotoxin. He can feel his system starting to burn it out, feel on the horizon the impending waves of nausea and bone-shattering chills that come in the final stages of regaining bodily function, but for now he is still trapped within his body, even the neural pathways to his left arm shut down for the count.

He wants to scream at them. He wants to grab the scientist and tear her throat out with his teeth as his hand crushes whatever bones are beneath it. He wants them to know the judgement they have called down onto themselves by bringing him back to _this_.

But he doesn't, because he's been here before, and it's better if they think he's harmless.

The scientist grins. “There! That's the marrow sample done.” She puts down the drill and hands a petri dish to a tech, humming a pop song to herself. The tech trots across the room to a bank of machinery.

A guard, tan with tight skin, lines around his eyes and steroid muscles under his black tee, appears next to the scientist. He's nervous. _Damn right you should be_ , Bucky thinks. “Can we dispose of it now?” the guard asks.

The scientist turns back to Bucky – she must be sitting on a stool, as it's a smooth swivelling motion – and looks down at him, _over_ him, her face contemplative. “God, Zola's work was good,” she breathes. “How come we've never matched this? He did this in the _Fifties_.”

She reaches her hand out towards his face, hesitates a moment to look up at a readout – oh, he must have some sort of monitor on him, he thinks – and then lifts his goggles off. He shuts his eyes just in time. Then, bolder now, she unclasps the mask.

“Huh,” she says.

“What?” says the guard.

“Didn't expect it-- him-- to be-- _uh_.”

The guard's tone drops. “Dr Reinhardt, make no mistake. This thing is walking death. I heard they started using that mask on it coming out of cryo after it killed a tech with his teeth. It doesn't co-operate, it's nearly unstoppable, and it can't be re-set any more. It _needs_ to be destroyed.”

“And _we_ need to make this darn serum work, Jeff,” the scientist countered, firmly. “I may need more living tissue samples. This is the thing that will let us finally create a reliable, permanent version of Zola's serum, I know it. I'm not throwing away the only source of untangling that mystery,” the scientist continues. There's the sound of a stool scraping backwards. “Will the cryo tubes hold?”

“That's what they're designed for,” says the guard, unhappily.

“Then put him in one. Don't start the freezing process. I just need to get a good sequence off his DNA and then you can do what you want with him,” says the scientist. “The sequence shouldn't take me more than a couple hours.”

The guards replace the mask and goggles, then unstrap him and shove him into a cryo tube. It's smaller than the ones they used to keep him in and it's dark and incredibly claustrophobic, his shoulders too broad for the space, his arms pinned straight down by his sides. The air inside is hot and rank with the stench of new metal.

A small, craven, terrified part of him wants to whine and beg for them to turn the cold on. He is thankful, for once, he is tranq'ed up so hard he can't form words yet.

 

* * *

  
In the museum gift shop, Steve decides on a card with a pretty Degas painting of a millinery shop for Alison's mother.

He also grabs one of a Manet seascape because something in the abstraction and simplicity of it makes him think of Bucky. It's his colours, too: pale blue, black, white.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter title song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e_HTBPUngEo
> 
> Sorry this chapter took a while! Hope it was worth the wait.
> 
> We'll finish up at 9 chapters, I think, which means only two to go. 
> 
> "not to go all London Calling": this image should be all the explanation you need http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/91apLp-DEQL._SL1500_.jpg


	8. 99 Problems

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The brief lives of 300 bullets. 
> 
> Or, James Barnes and the Terrible, Horrible, No-Good, Very Bad Day.

This is how Bullet #1 is born:

The DNA has been sequencing for two hours on the lab's supercomputer and Dr Sara Reinhardt has walked over to look at the thing in the cryo tube six times and rolled her eyes twice at the dozen Hydra guards with M4 carbines stationed around the edges of the lab. The guard's leader has checked his watch three times. The four techs assisting Dr Reinhardt have looked at the cryo tube window between two and eight times each.

The guard captain speaks after checking his watch a fourth time. “How long is this gonna take, Doc?”

“Hm? Another 18 hours for a full sequence.”

“Fuck,” the captain hisses. “It's gonna wake up.”

“Calm down, Jeff. I've been mixing the file-specified sedative in with the air recyc in the cryo tube. It's offline and it's going to stay offline,” said Dr Reinhardt, walking over to look at the motionless figure in the cryo tube for a seventh time. “I wonder what it remembers about Zola?”

She touches the round cryo-tube window, then turns to walk away.

There is a horrible screeching sound, of metal on metal.

A dozen assault rifles are shouldered, and Dr Reinhardt turns in horror towards the cryo tube, backing away as she does so.

A metal hand is now visible against the window of the cryo tube.

“Start the freezing process!” Dr Reinhardt shouts at her techs, stumbling over her shoelaces as she trips backwards.

The hand pushes at the window.

“Fuckfuckfuck--” stutters a guard.

“Shut up!” yells the captain over his shoulder, stepping forwards and taking aim at the window.

“Don't fire! Don't be an idiot! You'd just be helping it!” yells Dr Reinhardt. “We have the Asset's specs,” she says, pointing to the Kiev file on her desk. “That tube was designed to more than hold it!”

 _The Kiev file was last updated in 1965,_ smiles the thing in the cryo tube. _I have been upgraded many times since then._

 

The thing knows it has limited operational efficiency, barely above redline status, but it has a mission.

It also wishes to bathe in the blood of everyone in the lab room.

 

It pushes against the window.

 

Bullets #1-30 are born in a moment of shattering glass as the cryo tube window cracks then explodes outwards. The whole family streams from the magazine of the guard captain's M4 in three-round bursts over ten seconds and bounces harmlessly against the thing's metal arm as it reaches out and down to unclasp the top metal latch on the cryo tube. Bullets #17 and 28 nick the thing's upper back and neck, respectively. Flesh wounds. The thing does not feel.

The empty magazine hits the floor, though is unheard among the sounds of people shouting at each other and the screech of shearing metal as the bottom latch is broken.

Bullets #31-60 are scattered uselessly against the outside of the cryo tube and nearby tubes and the ceiling by a terrified new recruit with his gun on full automatic who loses his mind when his sergeant yells at him. Bullet #43 ricochets off a cryo tube and hits a tech in the shoulder. She screams.

The guard captain advances and yells at his team to switch to three-round bursts.

Bullets #61 dies as a squib in the barrel of the guard captain's M4 as he sticks it through the broken window of the cryo tube to try to shoot the thing which is no longer visible, having sunk down below window level. A metal hand flashes out and places its thumb over the barrel, bending it at a 90-degree angle. The trigger has been pressed, however, and so after bullets #62-68 charge into the barrel with no way out, the gun explodes in the hands of the guard captain, the charging handle whacking him in the face and hot gas burning his hands. He drops the gun, shaking his burnt hands, yelling in shock, stepping backwards. He pulls a pistol from a holster in his belt.

The liquid nitro mix for the cryofreeze finally kicks in, filling the immediate area with mist as it melts in the newly uncontained space, as the thing tears the cryo tube apart from the inside out.

Bullets #69-138, a mix of 5.56mm and 9mm rounds, splash across the increasingly obscured area around the cryo tubes. The guard captain is tagged in the right calf by Bullet #115, a richochet. There is the ghost of a shadow in the mist, its movements jerky, not right, and then amongst the hornet-swarm fury of the bullets, there comes a thunder of crashing, ringing metal: the line of empty cryo tubes are ripped from the wall, collapsing against each other, against the ground. Bullet #84 has winged the shadow's thigh, causing a deep gouge.

The guard captain raises his hand to stop firing, then waves his men forwards. Dr Reinhardt grabs the two nearest to her and demands they guard the sequencer, stuttering, “this is everything, this is everything, we can't let this get destroyed”. The guards are eager to do anything that does not involve going after the predator across the room, and nod their compliance to her.

The rest walk nervously into the cold, nitrogen-tinged mist. Their footfalls, the roll of spent bullet casings, and the hiss of the escaping liquid nitrogen are the only sounds in the room. The silence gnaws at the guards, eats away at what little confidence they had.

Dr Reinhardt hisses at the injured tech to sound the alarm, and to get out of here. But just as the tech is about to touch the alarm lever, it goes off anyway: four short, loud burst, over three intervals. External perimeter breach.

“The hell?” exclaims a guard.

“We're under attack, someone's attacking from outside--” said the captain.

Blast doors slam shut over all exits as per Hydra protocol: the lab is to be isolated from external attack. At other times, a reassuring countermeasure. At this moment, however, the twelve guards, four techs and one PhD do not feel reassured whatsoever, sealed in the lab with a thing that by all rights should not be able to move but just tore its way out of a cryo tube. 

“Fuck. Someone's trying to rescue it--” started one of the techs.

“Who the hell's going to rescue us?” whispers another.

“it's not armed. It's not armed-- it's still tranq'd, bring it down,” said the guard captain, trying to project more confidence than he felt. He swung the Glock 19 back and forth in the mist. Where the fuck _was_ it?

A cryo tube rolls off the neighbor it is resting on, hitting the floor with a heart-stopping KLANG. Nobody can tell if it just falls or if it's pushed, the fog is so thick in the room even those fifteen feet away from the tubes can't see distinctly what is going on.

Bullets #139-172, 5.56mm in three-round bursts, perforate the air around the cryo tube, still rocking into its final position and ringing with a soft, bell-like noise. There are many things bullets go through in real life that they don't go through in movies (car doors, tabletops, and crates, to name but a few), but the nearly inch-thick aluminum of cryo tubes merely sends ricochets.

Shortly after Bullet #166 leaves the muzzle of its gun, the overhead lights go out. Darkness settles like a command, and the guards stop firing; stop moving.

A guard makes a soft whimpering noise.

Then there is a sharp KRAK and spark from above the panel of computers and the rest of the power goes down. The complicated, expensive equipment sequencing the Asset's DNA whines into darkness, only 9% through its task, and Dr Reinhardt cries out, _no no no_ , and then more accusingly, _where is the secondary generator? Why isn't it--_

This is the lowest sub-basement. It has a cement floor. Which means all power and electrics are routed up through--

“-Jesus fuck! It's in the ceiling!” the guard captain yells. This was _lab duty_. Nobody was issued with infrared. Nobody was issued with night vision. Hell, they barely had decent kevlar. “Fuck it! Light it up!”

Bullets #173-254 embed themselves in the ceiling, muzzle flashes strobing the mist-filled lab like a cheap disco. Expended casings ring off the cement; footwork is already difficult due to the amount of full metal jackets scattered around the floor.

The noise is enough to muffle the sound of a small, round, silver grenade rolling towards the thickest concentration of guards.

When it explodes, killing three guards outright and severely wounding two others, nearly everyone with a gun is looking up, or turning away from the explosion. They do not notice the thing that has dropped down from the ceiling next to the plastic laundry bin of its personal effects, forgotten on a counter at the side of the lab lined with the sinks, fridges and storage cabinets.

Dr Reinhardt notices the shape lit by the glare of the explosion, and she screams, covering her head.

Nobody notices that its movements are stiff, weak. That it shakes involuntarily at frequent intervals, badly enough to make aiming difficult. That, had its clothing not been cut off it, it would still be unable to manage the fine motor tasks of dressing itself. Zippers, buckles, buttons: all too much with a body still wracked with the effects of neurotoxin. It has trouble enough to get the grenades out of the pouch on its belt; to pull the pair of Sig 226 TacOps pistols out of their holsters. It is thankful again for the metal arm, as always with the mental conditioning the difference between continued functionality at redline status and complete mission failure.

It leans against the wall of cabinets next to the counter and sights for the most competent of the remaining guards, the ones wth potential to do actual damage with their guns rather than closing their eyes and letting the muzzle drift upwards on recoil. The small fires caused by the grenade are enough, with its enhanced sight, to illuminate the room.

“It's over there!” Dr Reinhardt shouts, pointing, in a room so dark nobody can tell what direction she is indicating. “By the sinks!”

“Ten o'clock!” shouts a tech, helpfully. The armies of evil, the thing knows, are preceded by advance parties of helpful motherfuckers like this, in it for a pat on the head and a compensation plan with good dental.

Bullets #255-264, 9mm, exit the Sig in its left hand over the course of four seconds. This would normally take one bullet per person, neat head shots, six bullets from each gun, done. But its aim is so compromised it does not trust its right hand at all, and with the left it reverts to double taps, like some rookie. The guards wear ballistic vests but no helmets so faces it is.

Bullets #255 and 256 hit and kill the guard captain. Success. Bullet #258 takes down the soldier next to him. Success.

Bullet #259, 9mm, hits Edgar Fontana, Hydra guard of two years, in the neck, perforating his windpipe but missing major arteries. Failure.

Bullets #260 and 261 kill a tall guard who was already lifting his gun to return fire. Success.

Bullet #263 slices through the deltoid muscle of Marcus Washington, Hydra guard of nine months. It is a flesh wound. Failure.

Bullets #257, 262 and 264 are complete misses. Catastrophic failure.

Six hostiles dead, three wounded to incapacity. Three remaining. Plus techs. Embarrassingly poor performance. Almost as bad as DC.

 

Its legs collapse. It hits the ground, lets gravity take it. Compromised lungs, working back to full breathing, suck in air. As it falls, bullet #265, the first from one of the remaining guards, cuts past its skull, leaving a long gash which immediately begins to weep copious blood.

Bullets #266-280 destroy the cheap MDF cabinetry and splashback tiles where it had been standing. The remaining guards aim for where its muzzle flash had been, but go a little high due to fear.

It is comfortable on the floor. It shoots upwards. Bullet #281, 9mm, kills the rightmost guard, as bullets #282-284, 5.56mm, leave the guard's M4A1. They splatter into the top of the cabinetry and the ceiling. Bullet #285, 9mm, exits its Sig and hits the middle guard in the left hip, causing him to spin left in pain and spray bullets #286-291 into the final guard, who was fumbling a magazine change and had just dropped the new mag on the floor.

It pivots its left arm and aims towards the four techs whining and typing now-useless access codes into the keypad by the blast doors. Bullets #292-300 kill the techs. They are not armoured, and they are close together.

 

It rests. For five seconds or five minutes, it is not sure.

The floor is really, really nice.

 

It has been relying on expending its minimal energy on a few big moves, channeling as much through the brute force of its arm as it can: leaping up to the ceiling; swinging up and inside via the arm; pressing along the support beams above the heads of the guards; tearing out power cables. It has used up all its limited reserves of energy and the neurotoxin seems to know this, renewing the attack on its body.

But it has a mission. Plus three wounded guards and a very much alive scientist, the latter currently screamng and clawing at the blast doors like it will do any good at all. Like anyone can hear her scream through three inches of steel.

It gets up, staggering, and wipes away the blood sheeting off its face. It walks unsteadily over to the injured guards. Bullets #301, 302 and 303 end their lives.

 

It pulls its mask and goggles off as it stalks over to the scientist. She presses her back against the steel doors as it approaches. She is shaking. It lays down its guns and face coverings, then reaches for her. It uses the arm. The rest of the body remains only minimally functional.

“Look at me,” it growls.

She turns her face away. She is white with terror.

She should listen. It bangs her against the steel door, so she will listen.

“Look! Don't you want to look at Zola's fantastic piece of bioengineering? His _beautiful work?”_

It takes its metal thumb and forces her chin around to meet its eyes. She will look it in the eyes before she dies.

“Look at what you wanted to build. Don't you enjoy watching what it can do?”

She flinches at every word, trying to pull her face away.

“Imagine what it can do when it's not full of _fucking neurotoxin.”_

“W-why do you hate us so much?” she stutters, uncomprehending. “We _saved_ you--”

 

And it would laugh in her face, but part of it knows she is right.

Water comes from her eyes. She is crying. “We could save so many others. I was going to leak the serum formula online, once we stabilised it. Hydra is the only one that will fund research like this. I just wanted to _help_ \--”

 

It wants her to shut up. It wants her to stop saying "help". It bashes her into the steel doors until she shuts up.

Then it realises what it has done, and drops her corpse onto the floor. It shivers so hard its joints feel like they are coming apart.

In a small voice, it tries to explain to the smashed mess that was once her body, “Turning people into weapons is not helping.”

It stands, unsteady on its feet, sickened with itself.

The scream comes second. First its eyes are wet, wetness trailing down the grime and blood on its cheekbones. Then a raggedy sound tearing itself up from its guts, bursting out hoarse and achromatic, like knives scraping on steel.

It sinks to the ground, bullet casings rolling out of the way, and it cries, great wracking sobs, cries for a small weak blond who would have died young without the serum, for a tall brunet who tried to stay strong but ended up becoming hard, for the amputee who had hope in his eyes, for the sick, the halt, the weak, for all the help the mystery locked in its DNA _could_ give the them but that it will never allow, for mistakes and bad calls and impossible decisions, for a world painted in shades of grey.

 

Idly, lying on the cold cement, it wonders who is coming for it. Who set off the perimeter alarms. It hopes/does not hope it's Steve. It-- _he_ \-- will be furious if Steve appears, because that means he has left Alison alone. Or, even worse, has brought Alison along for the ride. That would be a classic Steven Grant Rogers plan. He will tear Steve a new one if he's damn fool enough to do that.

Of course if it's anyone else, they're going to discover the Winter Soldier ugly-crying on the floor, still half-paralysed and shaking like a junkie. Great. There's an Instagram moment.

 

So he gets up. It's the only thing he's ever really been good at: getting up again.

 

He pulls apart the machine that he saw the scientist fawning over and finds the tiny bit of himself on a slide inside. He grinds it into powder and then methodically bashes the rest of the computers and equipment to pieces, hard drives first.

He feels sometimes that he has spent his whole life in labs like this. Underlying the violent revulsion and fury, below the terror that initially sent everything in his head but the fight computer and the monster into lockdown, there is a strange feeling of familiarity, of homecoming. He staggers to the rapidly warming fridges and opens them, knowing pretty much exactly what he'll find inside.

He eats any samples he can find, washing them down with some flat Mountain Dew he found in the first fridge, and grinding the emptied slides and pipettes into dust against the floor with his metal hand.

Then he searches for the synthetic adrenaline. It's in the third fridge.

He cannot wait for the neurotoxin to burn away on its own. He has a mission. He will compress eight hours of moderate to severe agony into half an hour of near death.

As he grabs a bulk box of injection kits, it occurs to him that this isn't even in the top 10 stupidest things he's ever done.

 

* * *

 

Agents May and Hunter reach the lab first. The blast doors prove difficult, and it takes them a seeming eternity (in reality, under 10 minutes) to work out the right combination of EMP pulse and codebreaking to destroy the electronic lock on them.

As the huge steel doors finally creak open, a cold, stinking fog billows out. The lab is pitch black, a good twenty degrees below the temperature of the rest of the base, full of mist, and eerily silent but for the hiss of escaping gas. It smells of nitrogen, and the iron-copper tang of spilled blood. And, from what they can see from the limited light coming in from the hallway, there is blood. So much blood, on every surface. Hundreds of bullet casings on the floor. A wall of what once must have been computers, now smashed to pieces, sparks fitfully. A woman's body, head bashed in, lab coat spattered with blood, is cast like an abandoned ragdoll near the lab entrance.

“What the _hell_ happened here?” Agent Hunter asks, lip curled in revulsion at the savagery of the massacre.

They step into the room and start a sweep. Agent May flips her field glasses over to infrared and whispers to Hunter, “Got a live one. Over in the corner.”

They raise their Icers. Hunter flips on the floodlight mounted on the Icer's rail and barks out, “This is SHIELD! Hands up!”

The figure in the corner grits out a single word: “No.”

The pain in that word causes Agent May to signal to Hunter to hold fire for now.

The mist parts briefly and they get a visual on the figure.

It's a man, big and muscled and utterly feral, and mostly naked. He is getting up from a crouch, slick with sweat and darker substances, it's impossible to tell at this point if it's dirt or blood or both. One arm is completely dark. His eyes are absolutely dead as he watches them: no fear, no curiosity, nothing human. Just a predator, assessing risk. He shakes, like a drug addict, and Agent May notes the collections of injection-pens scattered around the floor.

Then Agent May sees his hands come out from behind his back. In them are a pair of 9mm pistols, held with the ease of someone for whom gun work is second nature.

Agent Hunter sees the pistols too, and his finger twitches on the Icer's trigger.

Phil Coulson's voice cuts sharply down the corridor from behind them: “Lance! Melinda! Stand down.” Coulson walks in, straight past May and Hunter, and as he passes, he says quietly to Hunter, “Trust me. This is not a fight you want to start.”

Coulson continues to walk towards the figure on the other side of the lab. “Soldier. We mean you no harm.”

“No closer,” the figure growls. The 9mms are pointed at them.

Coulson stops, steps backwards, and shows open palms.

Agent May realises who the figure in the mist is, and shoots Coulson a glare that could scorch steel.

Coulson smiles, mild. “Parts of this operation were need-to-know, Melinda.” Then to the Soldier: “Captain Rogers suggested you might need help.”

The Soldier snorts, indicating the destruction in the lab. “This look like needing help to you?”

Agent May has strong opinions about what sort of help the Winter Soldier needs (starting at her most charitable with a nice cell way down in the deepest floors of the Fridge) but out of respect for her boss, does not voice them at this time.

 

* * *

 

Bucky needs another ten or fifteen minutes. He's still shaking apart from the inside out. Can't concentrate. Can't aim. Maybe can't even walk. But he's not going to get more time. And SHIELD must not know how weak he is right now.

He deliberately turns his back on the trio of SHIELD agents, and walks to the bin of his things. Only stumbles once. Throws his boots on the floor and shoves his feet in them, then shrugs on the back holster with the Scorpion. Slings the other holsters, sheaths and belts over his right shoulder. Knows he looks faintly ridiculous in combat boots and boxers and blood. But hopefully a good murder stare and the 20lbs or so of ordnance slung over his shoulder will dissuade anyone from finding it amusing. He's glad/not glad that Steve isn't there, as Steve would think it was hilarious.

Time to play the shitty hand he was dealt for all it's worth. “Put your weapons on the floor. Back away from the door.” He raises the Sig in his left hand and waves it, briefly, in the direction he wants the SHIELD agents to go. “Over by the computers.”

The female agent's face is eight kinds of furious. Her partner is all puffed masculinity, clearly thinking _I can take him_ and pal, right now you probably could. The boss is hard to read. Ever so mild. He had known people like that at Hydra. They'd always been the most dangerous of all.

“Fucksake,” he says, working to keep his voice steady, leaning against a wall of cabinets to hide the fact his legs almost went out from under him. Keep up the bluff. Almost there. “If I wanted you dead, you'd already be dead.”

At a small hand motion from the boss, the two operatives put down their weapons and back up.

He pushes off from the cabinets and stalks towards the door with as much menace as he can. The two younger SHIELD agents are circling back, never taking their eyes off him, hands hovering near secondary weapons. The older one is relaxed, hands in his pockets.

He stops in the doorway and looks back at them. “I have had a _bad_ fucking day and tell any of your people if they so much as look at me funny on the way out I will shoot them. In fact, best I don't see anyone on the way out.”

 _Mostly in case they witness me stumbling into walls,_ he thinks, but they don't need to know that.

The boss nods.

 

* * *

 

Agent May stomps over to the ruined bank of computers and leans against them, collecting herself. To Coulson, she says, low and angry, “You want to tell me why we just let a notorious ex-Hydra assassin walk out of here? No debrief, no nothing?”

Coulson meets her gaze. “The long game is why, Melinda. The best intelligence work must occasionally turn a blind eye to the right now, in order to set up the pieces for games to be played in a few years' time.”

Melinda May is not pleased with his answer.

She is even less delighted half an hour later, after they finish mopping up and she goes outside to find that the Winter Soldier has stolen her fucking car.

 

* * *

 

Bucky has no idea how much time he lost inside the lab, but it's already dark when leaves. The car's clock says it is 9pm; Alison's concert is already well under way and he is still many miles from United Center. Luckily, the female SHIELD agent is the kind of woman to have makeup wipes in her glove compartment, so he's been able to remove the worst of the gore. And on the way out of the complex, he managed to steal a black t-shirt and combats off a downed guard, so he's no longer in just his underwear.

Kevlar would have been nice, but it's just that kind of fucking day, isn't it.

He floors it. The car he stole will be tracked; he's counting on that.

By the time he gets to United Center it's 9:45. The adrenaline and the neurotoxin are both burned out of his system. He is exhausted, covered in sweat, but his body feels back under his control again. He feels high; almost manic with delight that his fingers can once again operate things like safeties and holsters and zippers. 

He weapons up and fits the goggles and mask over his face. Parks the car illegally in front of the stage door. If SHIELD can't catch that much of a hint, well, fuck them.

He's out and moving forwards by the time the security recognises him. They're new. Probably AIM. Hey, maybe the Hand can drop by too and he can go for a trifecta of evil shitlord organisations in one 12-hour period.

(He shouldn't even think that. This is the sort of day where it would happen.)

He drops the guards, nonlethally, and idly thinks as he rips the backstage door open that he wants some sort of merit badge for that. The guards are wearing neon orange earplugs, the colour bright in the spilled light from inside, and he steals a pair from one of the unconscious men as he goes in.

Good thing, too. The music is DEAFENING. _Please don't let me be too late_ , he thinks. He slips inside and up to the rafters, to the heights, his place of safety, where he can overwatch and think up a plan.

On an i-beam 200 feet above the crowd, he notices four things, more or less at once.

The first is Alison. She is stressed as hell on stage. He knows her movements well enough by now that he can tell she is way off her game, behind the beat and skipping half the choreographed steps. Her lights are still beautiful – in this number, long pink and blue comet-trails zooming around and up the venue, around constellations of white stars filling the space.

The second is that the audience doesn't give a damn. They're all wearing the strange wraparound VR glasses, not far off the style of the ones the Soldier wears, and they are gazing forwards at an empty point in space above the stage, faces not following either Dazzler's movements or her lightshow.

_He is too fucking late._

He knows that the VR stream takes a couple hours to stitch together in postproduction from the multiple cameras, and at least he can stop it going live on the internet, stop it potentially targeting millions of people around the world, stop it embedding them with AIM mind-control codes. But where was Steve? Why had Alison done what AIM wanted? Maybe he can call Tony, if Tony will pick up the phone to him--

He feels a tremor along the I-beam, and he realises the third thing: he knows where Steve is.

Steve is about 100 feet down the i-beam. Wearing a pair of those damn VR glasses. And staring at Bucky with no recognition, only a concentrated and singular fierceness. Bucky knows that look, knows it like the inside of his own soul.

It's the look Steve gets when he sees a bully he will stop at nothing to take down.

_Karma has the worst timing._

Then he notices the fourth and final thing, beyond Steve, at an intersection of support beams: the glint of a sniper rifle. Pointed at Alison. Because there's one proven way to increase demand for a singer's work: cut off the supply.

 

Bullet #304 looked like it would be a doozy.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter title song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=32Xh9L-AqA8
> 
> Welp.
> 
> This chapter was an experiment (let's tell it from the bullets' POV!). Not sure it was successful but hey, that's what fics are for: to try stuff.
> 
> Apologies for the darkness. Bucky's mindspace in a Hydra lab ain't a great mindspace. 
> 
> Next chapter is parts of this same time period from Steve's and Alison's POV, since you're probably curious what the hell happened.


	9. Wrong

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It's murder on the dance floor.

Bucky is balanced on an I-beam high above an entire stadium of pop music fans currently under AIM mind control. Including Steve, who is about 50 feet away down the same beam and glaring at him like Bucky is the greatest threat to freedom and democracy in the modern age which-- okay, yeah, _fine_. But the immediate threat is the sniper further down from Steve, who is lining up his shot on Dazzler, performing below. It's an ugly standoff with too many civilians and too little room to manoeuvre.

Bucky's brain has of course supplied him with at least eight ways out of his current situation. All of them involve casualties: civilian, Alison or Steve.

That's not going to happen.

“This is your only warning. Drop your weapons,” said Steve. “Surrender, or you will be stopped.”

Yeah, that's not going to happen either.

 _Four bullets. Left knee. Both shoulders. Right forearm._ It would cripple Steve temporarily. He'd likely fall the 200' to the audience below. He probably wouldn't die. He might crush a few civilians.

No.

_The target is armed only with his fists. No shield, no gun--_

STEVE IS NOT THE TARGET.

_\--the target is 77% likely to open with a right hook and the following counteracting sequence would result with the left hand around the throat, at which time the target could be choked into unconsciousness--_

No, there would be no more of this, never. NEVER--

Steve charged towards him.

Bucky took a few running steps forwards, at Steve, to get momentum. Then he kicked off to the side, throwing himself as high in the air as he can, as he tries to get enough momentum to reach the next parallel rafter, 50 feet away.

As he somersaults through the air he draws his 9mm in his right hand and twists, sending three bullets towards the sniper in the crosstrees, as the sniper fires the first of his shots at Alison. And Bucky has two thoughts as he arcs through the air over the strange, silent crowd:

_I'm not sure I fired first_

_Don't think I'm gonna make that next rafter_

And Steve had jumped after him, of course he had and why was time moving so slowly and he wanted to scream at Alison but there was no way he'd be heard over the music and then she collapsed on stage, blood on the dance floor, at the same time as the sniper's head exploded like a rotten watermelon and a couple of the backing dancers are screaming and the music doesn't stop so much as fall away by degrees, first the vocals and then the band and soon there's nothing left but the electronics because of course Calvin doesn't fucking stop and if Bucky does one thing tonight beyond surviving it's gonna be to dropkick that kid through a wall, and fuck, he's really not going to make that rafter and he twists and reaches and the fingers of his left hand just graze the beam as he begins to fall but okay, hail hydra a little bit, because the fingers lock and now he is dangling by his fingertips and then Steve lands heavily on the beam, shaking it, and Bucky twists up and gets his thighs around the beam before his fingers slide off and then pulls himself up as Steve leaps at him and runs, runs towards the stage, because he has to get Alison out of there before AIM gets her and Bucky is faster than Steve, always has been, but it has been a _long fucking day_ \--

Steve bodyslams into Bucky's lower back and they both

 

go

 

into

 

freefall

 

.

.

.

 

Bucky's head smacks against an amp before he crashes down onto the stage, Steve on top of him almost instantly, hands at his throat, atta boy Rogers, excellent time for you to start making sound tactical decisions in a fistfight, and as his vision goes a bit fuzzy he can see Alison's backing dancers helping her, standing guard over her, but the Tykkio brothers are coming out and they have a stretcher and they are going to take her, _they are taking her_ \--

Then Bucky feels hands on his legs, and grabbing at his t-shirt but Steve's hands are at his throat and what--

The audience.

The audience have crashed over the barriers and the nearest ones are reaching for him to tear him apart.

He wants to say _something_ to Steve, something witty and smart and personal that will break the mind control, bring Steve back to himself but for once James Buchanan Barnes is at a loss for words. And he has about five seconds of consciousness left.

Think fast.

 

* * *

 

Earlier that day, Calvin had driven Alison back to the hotel in his new yellow Ferrari with an entirely reasonable expectation of getting some, or at least getting to second base now that the stupid creepy bodyguard wasn't looming around all the time. She wasn't really having it in the car and had just giggled and stepped away when he tried for a kiss and to get his hands under her shirt in the elevator, but he knew a little champagne and TV and a patented Calvin backrub would get her in the mood. She used to love messing around before gigs, and after them, and he had so much to celebrate. Hell, she was gonna hafta start being nicer to him because soon he was going to be even bigger on the scene than her. Once his album dropped, he'd be getting calls for collabs with Selena and Arianna and Iggy and Katy and _all_ the girls.

Calvin was briefly the happiest guy in Chicago, watching Dazzler's gorgeous ass sashay through her hotel door and then following it, even though Dazzler was trying to play it coy with no no honey i'm tired, I need some alone time, I have to focus on the concert.

“C'mon, Ali, I just want to relax you,” he said, going to grab her but somehow walking into a large blond wall instead.

A wall which said, “Didn't you hear? The lady wants some time alone.”

The FUCK did Captain America come from.

Seriously.

And how can Dazzler be alone if she's with him?

Bruuuh, it was bad enough with the creepy murder cyborg and his too-pale eyes that were always watching. Now he was getting cockblocked by America's favourite golden retriever? Fuck that shit. He was going to _bury_ Dazzler with the Cadence brothers. They already didn't like how she was performing.

Calvin smiled and shoved his hands into his Y-3 track pants. “Okay, yeah, no worries, innit. See you at the gig, Ali?”

Alison smiled weakly back at him. “Yeah, Cal, see you there.”

Calvin strutted back to his car, which the valet hadn't even taken down yet. He had _work_ to do. So much work.

 

* * *

 

Waldemar and Yorgon Tykkio were delighted with Calvin and thought his story about Captain America was _the bomb_.

Calvin was almost there. It had been a hard climb and sure, he'd stepped on a few people on the way up, but he could see the top. He could be up there with Pharrell and Swizz Beatz and Mark Ronson. He belonged there.

 

* * *

 

They wouldn't let Steve in the backstage door. There was a lot of new security, and even with Alison and Steve pulling an almost simultaneous, stereophonic “do you know who I am?!”, Security did not care. They sent Steve around front to the main entrance, and told him there was a VIP pass waiting for him there.

He'd have to somehow work his way up to the stage and swap the songs on Calvin's laptop, but he was a seasoned operative and one of the great tatical minds of the past century. Shouldn't be a problem.

He grabbed his laminated pass, threw it over his neck, stuck the VR glasses he was also handed into a pocket, and slotted himself into the sea of people slowly pushing towards the turnstiles. It was maddening, how the milling crowd inched forwards at a snail's pace. What was taking so long? Weight of numbers, or--

\--oh.

Everyone had be wearing glasses to go inside. Which meant they had to find them, put them on, talk to their goddamn friends about them, and then take selfies.

Steve sighed and put on the VR glasses as the turnstiles finally approached. They were fairly comfortable, not that different from Bucky's goggles, but a little heavier. And, presumably, neither bulletproof nor with a convenient infrared view.

As he showed his pass and dodged under a selfie stick, a young woman approached him. She looked familiar from his day guarding Alison during her rehearsal... makeup assistant? Record label intern? PR girl? He couldn't remember, but he definitely remembered her long blonde hair, baseball cap, and clipboard.

She looked hesitant. “Mr... Mr Rogers, sir?” she stuttered.

He raised his eyebrows then realised he was still wearing the goggles and she couldn't see that, so he said, “Yes?”

She touched her left arm, and then pointed to a closed door marked STAFF ONLY. “There's a guy... with a metal arm... he told me to--”

But Steve was already pushing through the crowd towards the door. _Bucky_. Where had he been? Was he okay?

The door was unlocked, and the small room was dark. Steve stepped in and closed it. “Buck..?” he whispered. There was no sound.

Until there was.

So much sound. And light. All of it, screeching and intense and in his head. His hands came up to rip the VR glasses off his face but his arms were pinned by two hard metal bands, no not bands, arms, some sort of android-- incredibly strong--

Steve panicked--

But the sound and light made it hard to concentrate, the stimuli assaulting him, like knives into his head, making the room and the android he was wrestling start to fade away, as if they weren't really there.

“Please do not struggle, Captain Rogers,” said Yorgon Tykkio's metallic voice, already growing distant. “This will only take a minute.”

And then there was nothing left to panic about, he was safe inside a little space, like the attic he used to hide in where his ma kept her wedding dress all folded in its box, and nothing was his fault any more, nothing his responsibility.

 

 

* * *

 

Waldemar Tykkio is waiting for Alison in the wings of the stage, as the concert is about to begin. He shows her a photo of Bucky, tied down and paralysed with neurotoxin, his eyes wild with terror. He suggests to her, ever so gently, that it might be best she stick with the programme.

Alison shakes as he walks away, as she waits for the smoke to fill and the lights to change and the music to start. She has always worn revealing stage clothing but she has never felt so exposed. So _cold_. A little voice in her head tells her that Bucky would want her to stick with their plan, that he can take care of himself, that he would make it out. That millions of people's minds were at stake, and they were more important than her bodyguard's life.

The louder voices, though, they say different things.

_But what if Bucky doesn't escape._

_But what if you are alone._

_But what if it's your life._

_But who will help you then._

 

* * *

 

Think fast, Barnes.

 

Steve's fingers close inexorably over his windpipe, starting to crush it.

Bucky twists hard, wrapping his legs around Steve's waist and flipping them over, winding Steve long enough that Bucky can bring his forearms up between Steve's and strike outwards, breaking the deathgrip on his throat. Steve immediately reaches for him again but Bucky yanks Steve's VR goggles off and crushes them in his left hand and Steve blinks, and hopefully that will--

\--Steve throws Bucky into a wall of amps.

Unfortunately half of them are empty cabs, just there for show, which means the wall collapses and begins to tumble down on him, or more accurately, where he landed and then immediately rolled away off the stage into a snarling mass of civilians. They're no more than a nuisance, no fighting skill, but there are so many of them. He shakes himself free with a low roar, like a lion beset by wild dogs, and several of the civilians fall or fly backwards, heads crashing against floors or tumbled amplifier boxes. Bucky starts yanking VR glasses off a few of them as he circles around, hoping to catch Alison before they take her away.

The civilians who he relieves of their glasses blink in confusion, then see Steve hurtling bits of broken stage backdrop towards them, and Bucky in mask and goggles, backing up. “Oh my god,” one of them shouts. “It's the Winter Soldier! Captain America needs help!”

And they start flinging things at him. He instictively brings his arm up to block, in case any of them has anything actively dangerous like a grenade, but no. It's shoes, cellphones. A canister of pepper spray. Some redhead reaches in her bag and chucks a small paper bundle at him. It is without doubt the first time he's ever had a tampon thrown at him (luckily, unused).

This. THIS is why he sticks to black ops, he thinks, as Steve launches himself at Bucky in a high, nasty, clothesline tackle.

Bucky ducks underneath him and has to use every ounce of control and presence he has to not just continue rolling the knife that's appeared in his right hand up into Steve's stomach. Into those perfect abs, that on lazy days after missions Bucky likes to suck hickeys into, because Steve is ticklish there.

He can't fight this way.

For seventy years, the Winter Soldier was the unstoppable force. Wind him up, point him at something and he destroys it, no matter what the cost to himself. It's not a lack of finesse, hell, he once shot someone's ear off from half a mile away to make a point. He's done assassinations with a delicacy and precision that raised some of them to the level of art.

But this--

This, the cost is too damn high.

Steve kicks him and he feels a rib break. Maybe two.

He rolls and brings his arms up to block Steve's flurry of punches, then sweeps Steve's legs out from under him.

The problem isn't even fighting Steve.

It's that he's fighting _himself_.

He's fighting the programming he held on to, the physical and mental training that made him the greatest at what he does. Fighting his own speed, born of reactions so ingrained they aren't conscious. _The target is using lethal force. The target leaves an opening--_

Jesus fucking Christ, Steve IS NOT THE TARGET.

Bucky freezes in terror, finger on the trigger of a gun he hadn't even remembered drawing, muzzle pointed between Steve's eyes, safety off.

Steve rolls to his feet and strikes, disarming him. Bucky's gun clatters away into a pile of splintered wooden debris, the remains of amplifier cabinets when someone roundhouse-kicks a genetically engineered super-soldier / cyborg into them.

Bucky steps backwards, playing for time and space and just some goddamn thinking room, but Steve isn't the leader of the Avengers for looks alone and he _knows_ when to press an advantage in a fight; when his opponent has started making mistakes and needs to be encouraged to make more.

Steve crowds him, punching and kicking faster than un-enhanced eyes can see. Bucky's already run down all to hell from his afternoon with Hydra, neurotoxin, and subsequent self-administered adrenaline overdose. And Steve isn't the target, nor is he the mission.

So Bucky does something ridiculous. He collapses down onto the floor his back after one of Steve's punches connects, and goes limp, stilling himself. Steve will be able to hear that his heartbeat has slowed significantly.

Steve pauses, blinks those blue-green eyes of his, and leans down cautiously to see if Bucky really is out. Mission accomplished? A little furrow appears between his brows.

Bucky moves snake-fast and slams his metal fingers into the vagus nerve at the side of Steve's neck, at the same time tangling Steve's feet in his.

Steve goes down like a sack of potatoes. And, thank whatever divine presences look kindly on hard-luck assassins, he _stays_ down. Unconscious. Bucky can only hope that he'll wake up in control of his own mind again.

Bucky sighs to himself. “Sorry, Steve,” he murmurs, gliding to his feet.

He hears yelling; it's the civilians behind him, god-kings of the fucking obvious every last one of them, reminding him that 1) he is an inhuman robot-monster who has 2) knocked out the personification of truth, justice, and the American way. Because of course the smart thing to do when you come across one of history's great monsters is to yell at it and call it names. Especially when it's armed to the teeth and in a really fucking nasty mood.

Bucky just shakes his head and sprints back up onto the stage. He really wants a sticker that says "I didn't kill any civilians today," and some alcohol that works. He leaps the wreckage of the amp wall and reaches the place where Alison fell a couple seconds later.

Alison's gone, of course, because this is the day that James Buchanan Barnes can't catch a fucking break.

Her crew of backup dancers are milling near where Alison was shot, confused, angry, and unsure what to do. The one with the pretty burgundy weave turns when she sees Bucky and Jesus God, _someone_ is finally happy to see him. “James! James, you have to help,” she says, “They took Alison!” She points to the wings, near where Calvin's mixing tower is set up.

He is about to simply grunt and stride past the girls to his mission, but then he pauses and looks at them. And says, “Ladies?”

The backup dancers cluster around him, like frightened but beautiful birds, and they all begin talking at once.

He hisses, and draws his hand across his throat. They stop talking.

“Listen. Captain America is over there, unconscious. Some asshole knocked him out. I need you to keep him safe until he wakes up. If any audience hassles you, take off their goggles and whack 'em upside the head. Got it?”

A couple giggle. A few more salute. And Bucky realised he's used a tone of voice that he hasn't used in 70 years, not since he wore a blue coat and fought a war with five complete idiots who agreed to follow an even bigger idiot into battle and he was the only sane one to keep them in line, except that everyone from Phillips on down thought he was crazier than a shithouse rat.

'Then go,” Sergeant Barnes barked. Then, as the others skittered off in their dance heels, he circled the upper arm of Burgundy Weave. Her name was Taneka, he remembered. She was smart, and the rest of the girls looked to her as a leader. “Taneka, wait.”

He reached behind his back and palmed a small, round, silver device, then held it up to her. “This is a grenade.” The girl's eyes widened a little. “You arm it by pressing this circle, here, and it takes five seconds to go off. Once armed, that's it. You can't un-arm it. I need you to take this and blow up the mixing desk.”

“Ohhh-kay,” the girl said.

“C'mon. It'll be fun,” Bucky said.

“Uh...” she said.

“Arm, drop, run like hell. Try to get it right under the desk. Don't forget the run like hell part.”

“If I get arrested--”

“You will _not_ get arrested. If anyone touches you I will make them wish they'd never been born.” Bucky says this last part in the flat intonation of the Winter Soldier, and is pleased when it makes Taneka smile.

“This is not how I expected my Saturday night to go,” she said, taking the grenade carefully from Bucky.

“Yeah, you and me both,” Bucky said, already striding off towards the wings.

He passes Calvin, who is rapidly shoving his laptop and equipment and probably a few things that aren't his into a duffel bag. Then he decides, fuck it, he has to have some joy in this bleak fucking life and he walks back as silently as he passed, taps Calvin on the shoulder, and suppresses a chuckle when the kid squawks and nearly jumps out of his skin.

Then Bucky punches Calvin clear across the stage, breaking at least three ribs and one drum kit in the process.

Luckily, Steve is not awake to be disappointed in him. And to be fair, J Barnes Esq is all out of fucks to give. Not that he had a huge pile of them to start with.

Bucky strides swiftly, silently, down the winding back corridors of the United Center. He's lost some time with his side missions but he knows Alison's scent and he can track her-- hell, he could track her across miles of wilderness, if he had to.

He knows he's close as the scent gets stronger, newer, and suddenly he hears footsteps-- unnatural footsteps, each the exact same distance apart, no variation-- and he runs up the wall and twists and arches out, flinging an arm across the corridor and bracing himself against the ceiling. He calms and stills himself, stretched across the six-foot corridor, becoming simply another shadow up above the fluorescent lights that illuminate the simple cinderblock passageway. People don't look up. 

Apparently, androids don't either. Yorgon Tykkio comes running back around a corner towards him, ducking into a room marked POSTPRODUCTION and yelling “Upload it! Upload it now!”, only to hear a bleary voice answer back, “It's still rendering!”, then another voice, “Wait, it's done! Okay, uploading in three, two--”

And then Bucky is there, dropping from above, six feet of metal and flesh fury suddenly filling the doorway of the little production room. Yorgon Tykko turns _(tik tik tik, servos humming and gears turning, Bucky can hear it now, now that he knows what to listen for)_ to attack him and Bucky kicks him into the big fancy computer with the two screens that has pride of place in the room and the two editors in the room look like they are about to cry or shit themselves or maybe both.

Bucky looks at the secondary computer in the room, the one with the UPLOADING:99% bar and as his eyes go to it, so does his gun. He fires two shots into the mainframe, then strides in past the editors and just rips everything computer-related he can find apart. Including Yurgon Tykkio,. He has no idea if he's been able to stop the upload of Alison's performance, if he can keep AIM's mind-control disaster from hemmorhaging beyond the thousands of people at United Center for Dazzler's concert, to the millions worldwide who would be able to stream the performance on the VR glasses.

Bucky has never wanted a team before, but can now see the point of having one. If he had a moment to spare, he'd call Tony Stark. He'd even apologise for the whole dead fish thing, but--

Yurgon Tykkio's voice clicks hollowly from the floor, where his ripped-off head has rolled. It tells him the usual bad-guy bullshit, some crap about upgrading people, and Bucky takes ten extra seconds out of his hunt for Alison to lean down, wave his metal fingers at Yurgon, hiss “wanna compare robotics?” and then close those fingers into a fist and pulverise the stupid android's stupid talking head into the ground until the cement floor cracks.

As he continues down the corridor he hears a muffled boom and some screaming, and thinks, _good job, Taneka_.

Alison is down at the end of the corridor, near an exit door, seemingly abandoned on a gurney. She's stil out cold.

They've strapped a bomb vest to her.

It has ten seconds left on the countdown.

 

_Nine_

 

Restraints ripped off

 

_Eight_

 

Pull the vest over her head, c'mon Alison--

 

_Seven_

 

No really this has to come off no time to defuse it

 

_Six_

 

THANK FUCK

 

_Five_

 

Left arm vs locked exit door

 

_Four_

 

Screech of tearing metal and left arm wins

 

_Three_

 

Grab the vest get outside get out--

 

_Two_

 

And throw it up into the night sky--

 

_One_

 

Duck back in, scooping up Alison

 

_BOOM_

 

\--and press her against wall to guard her from explosion and associated shrapnel as the sharp, white-yellow light of the blast flashes outside, and his ears ring from the sonic aftermath

 

and he rests his head against the cool cement blocks of the corridor wall

and breathes

just breathes for a few moments.

 

It's done.

 

Waldemar Tykkio is still out there but Bucky has Alison and she needs somewhere safe and some medical attention. The graze on her temple isn't bad, didn't penetrate the skull but she has a nasty concussion and lost a lot of blood. Head wounds are always bleeders.

Bucky wished he had a cloth or something to clean her up. She'd hate to be seen like this, drying blood all down her face.

He shifts her unconscious form until he is holding her comfortably, bridal style, her body leaning in towards his chest. Somewhere in the parking lot out there was his car, and if not, he'd steal someone else's car. He'd call Tony on the way home and have him stop the concert stream, if the file managed to upload. They were going home. _Finally_.

Bucky stepped out into the night, Alison in his arms--

\--To find he is surrounded by police and searchlights and SHIELD and TV crews, all of them pointing bright lights, cameras and guns at him. Oh yay. Three of his favourite things.

“Put your hands up, Soldier!” yelled some cop through a megaphone.

To one side of the cop, Bucky sees a local newscaster in a bright blue dress and immaculate blonde hair, talking animatedly to a camera, her back to him. “We are live at the arrest of the Winter Soldier, who is said to be behind a terrorist attack at a concert by popular singer Dazzler--”

Coulson and his agents are just watching all of this, leaning against their cars, waiting to swoop in like carrion crows and pluck away the shiny prize the cops think belongs to them.

“Hands up!” yells the cop again. Neither he nor any of the other police are getting within a hundred yards of him.

Bucky carefully raises Dazzler's prone form and tilts his head, _got my hands kinda full, asshole._

He steps slowly down the few cement steps to the parking lot, like he has all the time in the world. Which he really doesn't, if that stream has gone live. There have to be a hundred cops here, all pointing guns at him, rather than dealing with the twenty thousand people under or recovering from AIM mind-control in the stadium behind him. 

Bucky shuts his eyes for a moment, under the goggles. They can't see. They just assume he's gone still. There's only a single way out of this. All the probabilities, all the variables, wind down to one viable option. And that one is his worst nightmare.

Caring for people will kill you in the end.

Bucky opens his eyes, and walks towards bright blue.

Once he's well in the light of the police searchlights, as close as he dares before any of them get too afraid and start firing, he lays Alison down gently onto the tarmac.

Then he gets on his knees, pulls off his mask and goggles and places his wrists behind his head.

The cops stare at him and don't move. They think it's a trick. The cop with the megaphone is having a hurried conversation with a superior, who is also holding a radio.

Bucky waits until the news cameraman has focused in good and tight on him, then he looks right up into the lens. “Listen to me,” he says. “Please listen.” His voice sounds rough and low, and he doesn't speak loudly, but everyone silences. Nobody has ever heard the Winter Soldier speak. Nobody has ever seen his face, except in old file photos of Bucky Barnes before he died. Bucky feels naked. He wants to throw up. He wants to run.

He carries on. “I know-- I know you're not gonna believe me but the VR goggles they're giving away, it's a ploy by AIM to put sleeper codes in people. AIM is... AIM is a, a nasty organisation. Like Hydra, but with more robots. If you download the video from Dazzler's concert tonight, if you watch it with the goggles on, you are giving access to your brain to some really fucked-up people.”

Almost done. Bucky sighs, and shuts his eyes for a moment. He wonders how many times they'll shoot him when he's done talking. If there'll be tasers, or injections. If they'll strap him down.

“Please,” he continues, his voice almost a whisper now. He shivers, involuntarily. He starts again, louder. He has to make them understand. “If there's one thing I know, it's about being mind-controlled. It's horrible. Imagine being locked in a soundproof room in your own mind while you watch yourself do terrible things. And you can scream and scream and claw at the doors of the room all you want but there is _no. way. out_. You can't stop the bad things you're doing. Because someone else is driving. Oh. And to make it work, long-term, they have to damage your brain. So there's that, too.”

“Mind control doesn't make you better at things, or give you superpowers. You're still whatever you were beforehand. And for most of you, that's cannon fodder.” He sighs and shakes his head. He is so goddamn tired. “If you have the goggles, destroy them. If you get the file, delete it. Don't let AIM in your head. Just don't. Take it from me.”

Bucky sits back on his heels and looks over at the cops. He makes sure that his wrists are still crossed behind his head. “You can take me in now.”

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter title song: http://www.vevo.com/watch/depeche-mode/wrong/GB3230900021 another Patrick Daughters-directed video. He's the king.
> 
> Sorry this took so long to update. Hard chapter to write, plus my brain decided to outline in pretty intense detail (like 17,000 words of detail) the AU that somehow I have decided to write for Stucky Big Bang 2016. Derp.
> 
> Bonus song: Sophie Ellis-Bextor, "Murder on the Dance Floor": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xn_hRh8AGNk that was originally going to be the chapter title, but the Depeche Mode song is so much more in keeping with the general mood of the chapter.
> 
> By the way, if anyone sees this series recc'ed anywhere, let me know. I am tragic and attention validates me.


	10. The Man With The Golden Arm

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The further adventures of the No-Help, Can-Totally-Handle-This-By-Myself Club.

The police stared at the Winter Soldier. Even in their searchlights, he was a dark thing. His position on the pavement, kneeling with his wrists voluntarily crossed behind his neck, only served to emphasise his dense, defined muscles. He watched them back, pale eyes taking in every movement, every detail. He didn't look submissive. He looked _coiled_.

In front of him lay Alison, still unconscious in her skimpy, bright pink stage outfit.

He cocked an eyebrow at the cops. “Well? You going to arrest me or not? I won't bite.” Then, a slow smile. “Biting is inefficient.”

There is a 10-person SWAT team, 15 beat cops and brass, a few civilians from the media and, in the background, SHIELD lurking. The brass waved two big guys from the SWAT team forwards. “Sully. Markiewicz. Go.”

They approached the Soldier warily, the thin one holding cuffs in his hands, the tall one pointing a gun at him. The Soldier doesn't move. The Soldier doesn't move to the point of being unnaturally still, because he may be surrendering, but that doesn't mean he has to stop messing with them.

“Go on, Sull,” said the tall, heavyset one with the pistol. He's gripping the pistol with both hands, knuckles white, like that's really going to improve his aim, and steps over Alison's prone form, between her and the Soldier. Between, obviously, victim and assailant. The barrel wavers between the Soldier's chest and head.

Sully cuffs him. The Soldier remains still.

“Get his weapons,” says the one with the pistol, who must be Markiewicz.

Sully is standing behind the Soldier. He reaches down to take the most obvious one: the 9mm Scorpion carbine holstered between his shoulder blades. His hand gets about six inches away from the Soldier's back before the assassin bites out a harsh “No.” After the stillness, after the silence, the effect is like a bomb going off.

Markiewicz stiffens his arms with the pistol, white appearing around his eyes. Sully nearly trips over himself, stepping backwards.

“Go in, go in, full SWAT, guard the girl, on my mark--” the Captain starts.

“NO!” the Soldier yells, still kneeling, still handcuffed. “Stop.”

A brief moment of quiet passes over the crowd. When quiet fell unexpectedly at the dinner table, Bucky's ma used to say that it was because an angel was passing overhead. Whatever it is, hard-luck assassins will take anything they can get, angelic or not.

“I'll remove my own weapons. You can't... don't touch me,” the Soldier says. Then he looks up at the shorter cop. Sully. “Got another pair of handcuffs?”

The guy's brown eyes dart over to his partner, to the cuffs hanging from his belt, and he nods.

“Good. You'll need 'em,” the Soldier says, flexing his arms and snapping the chain on the pair around his wrists.

“Fuck!” said Markiewicz, taking a step to the side. He's not watching where he's going and his back foot is about to come down on Alison's fingers. All 200-odd pounds of him, on her slim little hand. He'll crush it--

The Soldier moves snake-fast, stepping up inside Markiewicz' reach, divesting him of the pistol, crushing the gun instinctively in his metal hand, and rolling the cop over his shoulder and onto the ground. It was the gentlest takedown he could manage but it still unleashed pandemonium: voices in the dark screaming, _oh shit, fuck, he's attacking, officer down, fuck, shoot--_. Nervous cops start firing and he dives on top of Alison to cover her, angling himself so his left arm was between her and the police, bullets already pinging off it. Something furious and animal, the rage that kept him alive through 70 years with Hydra, rebels viscerally at being pinned down like this.

_(roll to the right, draw both pistols and take out the searchlights with gun in your left hand, TV cameras with the gun in the right hand, once cameras are down then move full speed, 300 yards to car and/or 500 yards to reliable get-black)_

He could get out. He could. But not with Alison here. The moment Bucky draws (and his hand itches to pull the Scorpion out of his back holster) the air will get very fucking lead-filled and while he can dodge, deflect or simply fucking take the hits of the bullets, he can't get Alison out with any decent probability of her survival. At least now, any bullets he can't deflect will have to pass through his body first before they reach Dazzler's. Behind the searchlights, everyone is yelling at each other, thankfully some genius has remembered that Dazzler is there and that accidentally shooting her on live TV would be bad for the Department, but someone else thinks Bucky is trying to strangle her or use her as a human shield and a sniper is saying in somebody's comm that he has a shot, should he take it, and you can tell from his voice the sniper is itching to take it, to be the hero who took the Winter Soldier down, and Bucky looks out the corner of his eye at the top of the United Center and there he is, a patch of uneven shadow and the glint of a scope--

“Stop! Stop shooting,” Director Coulson's voice rang out. “SHIELD is taking jurisdiction.”

The cops mutter and glare, but the last bullets stop, and the SWAT leader says _hold, hold_ into his comm and gets back a disappointed _copy_. The brass strides over to Coulson, the anger of a ruffled bantam rooster in every step.

Bucky remains hunched over Alison, glaring at all of them over the barrier of his left forearm. He watches as the shorter cop, Sully, grabs his partner and they stagger back towards the SWAT team's section of the police cordon. He watches as the two SHIELD agents from earlier today, from the Hydra lab, walk slowly past the searchlights, starting across the empty space towards them, strange little guns raised.

Great, Bucky thinks. Weird science guns that glow blue. Well doesn't that bring back happy memories.

Their mild little boss trails behind, and Bucky can just guess the tack he's going to take: _Come with us, Soldier. We can get you out of this nasty mess. We just want to talk. We have this convenient cell arranged. Of course, if you were willing to work for us, you wouldn't have to stay in the cell... Soldier, this person is a danger to freedom and must be eliminated. Your skills are a gift..._ Oh, Bucky knows _exactly_ how this will go down. Because in the end the only difference between the good guys and the bad guys is which one gets to write the history books.

Beneath him, Alison stirs and moans. Bucky looks down as her eyelids twitch, then open. “Hey,” he says. “Take it slow. You have a bad concussion and there are a lot of people pointing guns at us.”

Alison sighs. “People pointing guns at us. Which evil organisation is it now?”

“Chicago PD.”

Alison groans.

“Also local news channels.”

Alison tapped Bucky's chest with her open palm, and was about to say something, but then she furrowed her brows and plucked at the thin black t-shirt he was wearing. “You're missing like four layers of leather.”

“Yeah,” says Bucky, “it's been a bad day. You want to get up?”

“I think I need some help. My head feels like it's about to split in two.”

Bucky rolls slowly to his feet, the motion even more graceful for being so slowed down, for not wanting to spook the assembled police any more than they already are. He keeps his hands away from his sides, open. _Nonlethal. No harm. Not unless you really piss me off._

Weird blue science guns still twitch upwards, following him.

He gives Alison his left hand to hold, and circles his right around her lower ribcage, gently lifting her to her feet.

“Do you have a plan?” she whispered.

“Right now it's basically 'try not to kill anyone on live TV,'” he said. “But odds aren't looking good.”

Alison frowned. “This is _bullshit_. You saved my life. Again.” Then she tilted her head. “In fact...”

The Shield team were about 10 feet away from them, and the mild little boss began to raise his hand, to open his mouth. _Come with us, Soldier..._

Alison stepped in front of Bucky. “Hi everyone!” she called out, loud and bright, then flinched at her own noise, touching fingers to her head. Bucky steadied her, metal hand on the small of her back. Then Alison stepped back and threw an arm over Bucky's shoulders. “Hi, I'm Dazzler, this is my bodyguard, and I'm afraid there's been some misunderstanding?” She's smiling like she's on a red carpet.

Bucky smiles too and waves a little bit, and is rewarded by a stunned expression on the SHIELD boss' face. Bucky can watch the gears in his head turning, trying to find a way to twist the ever-fluid situation to his advantage.

Alison begins walking slowly towards the searchlights, and she's still as wobbly as a new foal, but between having her arm aorund Bucky's shoulders and Bucky keeping his left hand just next to her ribcage, they both manage to move forwards with some semblance of grace. The tiny, curvy pop star in her fuchsia PVC and feathers, and the assassin, bulk and angles and shadows. Bucky thinks she's steering them towards the police, but then realises via a gentle pressure from her hand that she is aiming them towards the TV crew. Good girl, he thinks. Use the other civilians as cover.

Alison keeps talking. “I'm happy to take a couple interview questions, but then I need James to take me back to the hotel.”

The local newscaster nearly trips over her own feet, she is hurrying over so fast.

“Miss Blaire,” comes the SHIELD boss' soft voice. “I'm afraid we need to take your bodyguard in for questioning--”

“And why is that?” Alison said, her voice suddenly full of sharp edges.

“Because he's a killer!” a cop's voice shouts from behind the searchlights.

Alison puts her fingers to her lips and puts on a shocked expression.

“James,” she says, turning to him and adopting a motherly tone. “Did you kill anyone today?”

“Uh.” He has to think for a moment. It's been a long fucking day. “Does Hydra count?”

“Nah, evil science Nazis don't count.”

“Androids?”

“Not people, so nope.”

“Okay, then, no. Haven't killed anyone today. Wait: I shot the sniper who was trying to assassinate you during your concert.” Bucky smiles, predatory, and looks straight up at the SWAT sniper on the United Center rooftop. “I like killing second-rate snipers.”

(The faint scrape of boots and clatter of a bipod falling over from on high briefly warms his black heart.)

The two camerapeople move in closer to Alison; they're right up in their faces now and Bucky suppresses an urge to flinch; to strike out and break the cameras; push them back. He focuses instead on Alison, as her brown eyes look up into his. She's wearing heavy stage makeup; fake eyelashes as long as bullets.

“Are there any of the bad guys left? You know, the ones who tried to hijack my concert and mind-control millions of pop music fans?” Alison asks. Bucky loves her in that moment. She's wasted in pop. Fuck, he would have stayed with Hydra if they'd had people like her running it. Hydra would be _running the world_ if Dazzler had the serpent chair.

“Yeah. Waldemar Tykkio,” Bucky says. The TV cameras push even closer, more lights shining in their faces, microphones thrust at them. He has about sixty more seconds of it that he can cope with, before he's going to need space urgently enough that he's willing to use violence to get it. “He's AIM. An android. Behind all of it. He's the one who strapped the bomb vest to you. I could either get you safe or chase him. I chose you.”

Dazzler delivers the killing blow. Whoever said words couldn't hurt them had never met Alison Blaire when she was angry. “Well, thank heavens we have so many brave boys in blue here to hunt him down,” then she turns to the trio of SHIELD agents, “and bring him in for _questioning_.”

The senior SHIELD agent's mouth is opening and closing like a guppy. It is a beautiful thing.

The TV reporter immediately asks, “Miss Blaire, how did you get the Winter Soldier as your bodyguard?”

“Through great good fortune. I'd be dead now if it wasn't for him. If I'd had anyone else guarding me. He's the best,” Alison says, glancing up at Bucky with her first genuine smile of the entire interview. She's quick, she catches the tension in his jaw, how stiffly he's holding himself.

“Can I ask him--”

“No, I'm afraid no questions while he's working. I can answer one more?”

“Yes. There's a rumour that Captain America was at your concert?”

“I wouldn't know anything about that,” Dazzler says. “He wasn't on the VIP list. But perhaps he likes pop music.” She takes Bucky's arm again and smiles. “Thank you so much. It's been a traumatic night for all of us and I just hope all of my fans are okay. We'll be rescheduling a free concert in the park for fans and friends here in Chicago to make up for what happened here. Keep an eye on my website for details. Goodnight,” she finishes, snapping her finger in the air and causing little pinpricks of coloured lights to swirl around them, dim lights that are bright enough to show up on camera but not so bright they'll blow out the exposure.

And then she wiggles her manicured fingers, turns on her platform heels, and gently tows Bucky off towards the parking lot. Thankfully, all the cameras are local news teams, not TMZ or gossip, so they don't go chasing after Dazzler. Or maybe, they (rightly) think that Bucky wouldn't take kindly to it, and that pissing off the genetically-enhanced cyborg assassin might be a foolish way to end the night. Said assassin, and charge, are both taut with tension as they approach the police cordon, on edge against the inevitability of institutional stupidity, but nobody stops them.

Alison's outfit's feather shoulder-pieces flutter in the breeze as she walks; her footfalls in her fancy Zanotti shoes clip loudly along the pavement. Bucky's footfalls make no sound.

Bucky glances back at United Centre, and Alison whispers, “What?”

“Just worried about Steve,” he whispers back.

“Is he-- did something--” Alison starts, worried.

Bucky just nods. He's too tired to explain.

They find where Bucky parked the Lamborghini that morning and they both stand there for a moment, dull with the realisation that it's almost over. In the distance they can hear the police captain organising teams to go into the United Center, albeit with a grudging, weary note in his voice.

Bucky pulls Alison into a hug, and the tension starts to ease out of both of them. “Thank you,” he whispers. “I, uh, I have trouble asking for help, but you always know just when to give it.”

Alison squeezes him a little tighter. “It's okay. Remember when we met? I thought I could handle all this myself.”

He snorts in amusement, then breaks the hug and taps a metal index finger on her chin. “Why don't you sit down on the kerb and take those shoes off? I have to check the car for bombs.”

 

* * *

 

Bucky is in the bath when the hotel phone rings. He'd cleaned up Alison's head wound and bandaged it, brought her water, helped her clean off her stage makeup and outfit and get into pyjamas, made her lie down and hid her phone and the TV remotes so she could rest her eyes. By then Alison had enough of being mother-henned by the Fist of Hydra (hiding the phone had been a really popular move) and started making comments about how said Fist stank and was grimy and had dried blood under his fingernails.

Bucky finally bowed out and retreated to his part of the suite. As he caught sight of his own reflection in the bathroom mirror, he realised how right Alison was. He was disgusting. His eyes and lower face were mostly clean from the goggles and mask; the rest of him was covered in a mix of dirt, sickness-sweat and (mostly) other people's blood. He showered first, to get the worst of it off, then turned the tap and began to fill the large, luxury bath to soak the ache out of his bones.

Endless hot water was one of the things he loved about the future. Also, bubble bath.

The ringing of the room phone snapped him back to the present, from the meditative nothingness where his mind had been drifting. Bucky heard Alison's sharp laughter through the walls, and her happy “sure, come on up!”.

A few minutes later, there was a knock on the door, and Bucky could hear the whole gaggle of backup dancers there. He recognised the back-up dancer Taneka's voice as she cried, “Special delivery!”

“He's staying in the same hotel,” squealed another of the girls.

“Oh my god, I gotta put this on Instagram--”

Two voices now, instant and sharp in refusal. Alison's “No!”--

\--and Steve's.

_Steve was okay._

Steve was okay and he was _there_ , in the suite.

Steve was there, and Bucky couldn't go to him. Because much as he liked the backup dancers, he had no faith in their ability to keep secrets. Alison owed him a blood debt, and even beyond that, he trusted her. Not the other girls. No way.

So Bucky stayed in the bath as Steve made small talk, pretending to introduce himself to Alison as if this was their first meeting (C-, Rogers, even the Bulgarian Secret Service wouldn't have promoted you beyond Junior Case Officer, and those clowns thought the Markov assassination was a good idea.) He was too tired to listen in, too jangled up inside to cope with hearing Steve but not being able to go out and see him. Because yeah, the world knowing that Captain America is bisexual and his partner is a contract killer best known as Hydra's former hunting dog... that would end so well for everyone. So he did breathing exercises, submerging himself under the bathwater for minutes at a time until his lungs burned, then coming up again.

Underneath the water, Bucky thought about the irony of the past week. He'd taken this contract because he wanted to try not killing anyone for once. He wanted Steve to be proud of him, to not give him that momentary, wounded look when he would say he's off on a new contract, the look that said Steve would be scanning the papers for mysterious or sudden deaths for the next few weeks, tracing his handiwork. And instead he'd killed more people than in the last ten contracts combined.

Apparently you can run from anything except your own nature.

When he came up from his tenth submerging, the outside rooms were silent, and a small cardboard envelope had been slid under the bathroom door. An envelope with a room number on it: 1723.

And a keycard inside.

Steve.

Why do you hate fun.

 

* * *

 

Fifteen minutes later he gives Steve the fright of his life when Steve comes out of the bathroom of room 1723 to find Bucky leaning against the balcony doors, arms folded, no keycard in sight.

“I should have figured you wouldn't need the key,” Steve said.

“Just worried about security cameras. I disabled the ones on our floor, but not down here.” Then: “You okay?”

Steve nods, in a perfunctory way which suggests he is not, in fact, okay at all. Bucky knows.

And Bucky can't look him in the eye, can't look up at the nasty bruise on his neck, all he can do is stare at the fingers of the arm that did that damage, flexing them, making the plates realign over and over. “How's your head? I'm uh, I'm really sorry--”

Steve's face crumples; his voice comes out strange and high and cracked. “No, Buck, I'm sorry. I never knew... I... what it was like, not being able to--”

Bucky is over to him in a heartbeat. He knows. God, does he know about mind control. He folds his arms around Steve and gets him down to one of the beds, before his shaking legs completely mutiny on him. Steve shudders in his arms and holds onto him like a drowning man, and Bucky rubs his back and whispers against his neck, “It's over. It's okay. You're free. It's okay,” again and again until Steve stops shaking.

Steve pushes away a little and puts his hands around Bucky's face, looking at him, looking right into his eyes with a sort of crazed desperation, a hurt borne of secrets and shame. His eyes are so blue against the red around them, it's almost painful.

Bucky closes his eyes slowly and leans his forehead against Steve's, and he says the one thing that he never thought he would tell anyone, the dark, twisting truth that writhes in his heart like a worm. It comes out as a rough whisper; “It's okay if... if a tiny part of you welcomed it. Not having to be responsible for anything, any more.”

Steve cracks, barking out a hoarse cry of recognition and terror, and comes apart in Bucky's arms. Bucky strokes his hair and rocks him, humming and making gentle shushing sounds, the both of them sitting on the bed like children, legs intertwined.

“I tried to kill you,” Steve gasps out.

“Yeah, but you didn't,” Bucky whispers, hugging him closer. “You and me, if we start obsessing about might-have-beens... it'll never end.”

“nnf,” Steve whimpers, burying his face in Bucky's neck.

Finally the tension bleeds out of Steve's back and shoulders and Bucky lays him down on the bed. He leans down over Steve and kisses him, gently, barely opening Steve's lips with his tongue.

Steve throws a heavy arm over Bucky and pulls, dragging him down to the bed, too. He is still barely holding himself together, barely keeping his thoughts from spiralling downwards into dark pits of recrimination and self-hartred. He looks at Bucky and all he manages to say is, “Stay?”

Bucky nods, and nuzzles into Steve's neck. He throws an arm and a leg over Steve, using his weight and warmth to ground him. And as Bucky watches Steve's breathing even out, and his eyelids flutter closed, he thinks of all the things he wanted to say:

_Steve, they put me in a cryo tube today._

_They shot me full of neurotoxin first._

_I lost my mind for a while._

_I forgot I was human._

_Steve, I'm not okay._

But Steve looks so peaceful in his sleep, the lines of worry gone from his face. It would be cruel to put them back.

Once he is sure Steve is deep in sleep, he gets up. No rest will come for him this night, and lying in bed watching the clock will only make the cacophany of voices in his head louder.

 

* * *

 

Bucky paces, and stretches, and checks in on Alison three times. Each time he does, he tucks another knife, another gun onto himself. He feels hemmed in; caged. His head is a mess. Not having external threats to deal with any more means the only threat left is himself.

It's so much worse, too, knowing that his face is all over the internet. It terrifies him down to his bones in a way even being back in Hydra's hands hadn't. Because it's okay to be crazy if you're a ghost. But he can't handle people touching him, expecting things of him, pointing at him. Like he's some sort of... curiosity.

He needs to run.

He needs to disappear.

He needs to stop obsessively checking the perimeter because Jesus Christ, Barnes, it's a fucking _hotel room_.

 

* * *

 

Steve rolls over shortly after dawn. Bucky is sitting next to him, reading, and Steve tries to plant a kiss onto his side only to brush his nose against black metal. He frowns. “Were you made of knives yesterday evening, only I was too shaken up to notice?”

“No. Sorta... acquired them as the night went on.” Bucky looks down at him and Steve notices the heavy shadows under his eyes.

“...Buck?”

Bucky exhales, and shuts the book. He's been reading the same page for an hour, anyway. “Stevie, I have to go away for a while.”

And there it is, the furrow between the brows, the advance guard of the lines of stress on Steve's face again. “Another contract?”

Bucky shakes his head, and points a metal index finger to his temple, eyes still downcast.

“Bucky. What happened yesterday? Something happened. I can see it in your face.”

Well, now Steve's going to be sad anyway, so no point trying to save him from it any more. “AIM sold me back to Hydra. They paralyzed me, and sold me, and then Hydra tried to take a DNA sample. Oh, and then they stuck me in a cryo tube. It went as well as you could expect. Then,” Bucky makes a vague hand gesture in Steve's direction, _you got mind-controlled and attacked me_ , “and then I kind of did this hail-Mary thing and went on TV to try to stop people watching the stream of Dazzler's song that had the mind-control subroutines in it.”

Steve blinked in shock, then grabbed Bucky by the shoulders. Bucky flinched so hard that he ended up standing up, a few feet away from the bed. “Bucky, why the _hell_ didn't you tell me all this last night?” Steve demanded, his voice harsh with surprise.

Bucky's eyes skated away, and he shrugged one shoulder. A knife had appeared in his left hand, and Steve watched the repetitive motion of the hilt being spun over his fingers, metal against metal, _tak tak tak_. Finally, Bucky muttered, “my head's in a real bad place right now. I'm not safe, to be in a city.”

Steve leaned forwards, on the edge of the bed. “Bucky, have you ever considered, uh, therapy?”

Steve felt a breeze by his face, and knife that was in Bucky's hand was now embedded in the opposite wall, all the way up to the hilt.

Bucky turned on his heel and walked away, his hands up. “This is why I need to go away.” He put his hands over his face and focused on breathing, focused on trying to push the nasty, jagged parts of him back into the box they lived in when they weren't being used. He had asked a book once what you do when love and trust and friendship were foreign concepts, and it had replied _First, do no harm_. And here he was throwing knives at the man he loved. Good one, Barnes. A+.

Mind, telling the Winter Soldier to do no harm was like telling a knife to stop cutting things.

But Steve deserved better.

Bucky sat down next to Steve on the bed, and rested his shoulder against him. He could handle that much touch, and Steve knew him well enough by now not to try throwing an arm around him when he was in this sort of flinchy, hypervigilant state. “I'm sorry,” he said.

Steve leaned back into him for a moment, a wordless _apology accepted_ in their nonverbal code.

“Thing is,” Bucky said, his voice quiet, “I don't think my brain works like a normal person's, any more.” He huffed out a breath and held out his hands, measuring a distance of about 12 inches. “My head works really well, most of the time, within specific parameters. No more than two weeks' downtime between missions, or everything becomes a mission and it's really fucking dull standing in the Starbucks queue and having your brain shout at you how to put down everyone in the store in under five minutes. I mean, my brain does that all the time anyway, but it's usually a whisper that I can ignore when it's not needed. And, I need to be able to get alone, to move around without people staring at me or trying to, you know, touch me. And I've just blown the last one completely out of the water for the foreseeable future.”

“What would happen if you let it all go, Buck? Just... let go of the Winter Soldier?”

Bucky's eyes went wide with a sort of horror, and he he shook his head, the motion small and controlled. “Then there would be nothing left of me.” Then he narrowed his gaze. “Also, I like it. No, fuck it, truth time, Steve. _I love it_. The fuck would I do if I stopped? I _love_ fighting. I love working missions. And, Steve, I have a body like a racing engine. It's always on. I never see you get like this so it must be a difference in our serums, but if I'm kept inactive for too long I am a _disaster_. The hell do you think Hydra would stick me in cryo?”

Bucky sighed and lay down on the bed, rolling onto his side so his back was to Steve. “I'm sorry. I know I'm being a jerk, Steve. I am trying to be a better person. Not doing very well at it, but I'm trying.” He moved infinitesimally closer to Steve, and murmured, "You make me want to be a better person."

Steve looked down at Bucky, who was all sculptural angles and grace even something as simple as lying on a bed. Bucky who had the sort of day that would have irreperably broken anyone else, and who was already gathering the pieces of himself, planning to plow on as best he could. Bucky who _oh by the way I decided to throw away the thing most important to my safety in the whole world to save a bunch of strangers_. Bucky who would never see himself as a hero.

“Can I put my arm around you?” Steve asked.

Bucky's head moved; a small nod.

Steve lay down next to Bucky, his chest just touching Bucky's back, and lay his arm over Bucky's waist. “I don't want you to change, Buck. It just... it hurts me when I see you hurt, and then I grab at anything to try to make you feel better.”

Bucky shifted so his back pressed into Steve's chest, and Steve wound his arm a little tighter around his love's waist. “Dunno what I do to deserve you,” Bucky mumbled.

Steve pressed his lips to Bucky's ear. “That thing with your hips comes to mind.”

Bucky tried to suppress the smile that threatened to take over his face, and failed. “Rogers, I'm sulking. What makes you think I'm in the mood?”

Steve poked him in the ticklish spot on his side. “You're grinning an awful lot for someone claiming to be in a snit. And besides, you're _always_ in the mood. You've been in the mood since 1936, at least.”

Bucky rolled onto his back and scrunched up his nose. “1933, actually.” Then he raised an eyebrow. “Which thing with my hips?”

Steve put on a face of complete innocence, the aw-shucks-I'm-from-long-ago face he used to get people to underestimate him. “Well, it's hard to describe, as such, but if you wanted to demonstrate, I'll tell you when you're getting close.”

“Nah,” Bucky said, throwing a leg around Steve and flipping them so Steve was now on his back and Bucky was over him, straddling him, “You just tell me when _you're_ getting close.”

“I always do,” said Steve. Then he poked at a sheath on Bucky's thigh and pouted.

Bucky rolled his eyes. “Getting there.” He pulled off his shirt, and then stripped off the three holsters and six knife sheaths scattered about his person. As Bucky was busy divesting himself of his arsenal, Steve's eyes skated over all the new wounds marking Bucky's body with red, cruel touches. The long, nasty gash down his right side. The thing that looks like a stab wound, low and ugly, on his left. Bullet grazes on the right bicep and shoulder. Bruises everywhere. Steve's fingers reach up, exploring, cataloguing. He would swear vengeance on the people who inflicted these hurts on Bucky, but he's quite sure they've all already been dispatched to their bitter rewards in the hereafter.

Then when the last knife and sheath drops to the carpet, Steve's hands move up still further, into Bucky's hair, to tug him down for a kiss, long and deep. Bucky sighed and moaned into his mouth, and started to grind down with his hips.

Steve bit his lip, red from the kiss, and thrust up into Bucky's body. But suddenly Bucky's warm, solid, _hard_ weight was off him, and Bucky was leaning against the wall opposite the bed, staring at him with a smile quirking the edges of his mouth.

“Steve,” he breathed. “Strip.”

Bucky clearly had an idea. And Bucky's ideas in bed were usually worth indulging. Steve pulled his t-shirt over his head and cast it aside, and then slipped out of his boxers. When he looked up again, Bucky was still leaning against the wall, but had slid his hands down his already perilously low-riding sweatpants. “Where's the lube?” Bucky said, voice already thick with desire.

Steve rolled over and reached into a bag by the bed, and pulled out the small plastic bottle.

“Good,” Bucky said, his eyes predatory. “Prep yourself. I'm going to watch.”

“ _Bucky_ ,” Steve moaned, half in frustration, and half in desire. Bucky's huge, pale eyes were watching him, roving up and down his body, as Bucky pushed his sweatpants down and started to stroke himself.

Steve uncapped the lube and slicked up his fingers, spreading his legs and running his hand down between his thighs. He stared back at Bucky as he slowly stuck his middle finger in his ass, watching as his lover moaned at the sight and pushed up into his own hand. “nnuh, Steve, you're so gorgeous,” Bucky moaned, circling the base of his cock with his left index finger and thumb to calm himself down.

Steve continued to work his finger into his ass, his hips starting to rise and his head rolling back. God, it felt so good. “Bucky. Too far away. Come closer,” he moaned.

And Bucky was over there, damn his catlike steps, looking down at him, stroking himself off again as he watched Steve edge his index finger into his hungry rim. Steve bit his lip and looked up and Bucky. Bucky leaned down to kiss him but stopped, half an inch away from his lips. Steve whined and lifted his head, chasing the kiss, and Bucky edged away, keeping the distance.

Then Bucky took his flesh hand and hovered it over Steve's dick, and Steve groaned, “yes, God, _yes_ ” but once again it never connected; those fingers never got closer than half an inch, despite how much his dick jerked up, desperate for the touch.

Bucky looked down at him like he was worshipping him (he was; _he was_ ) and traced his hand ever so slightly above Steve's abs, Steve's nipples, his throat and lips. It was, in the long line of incredibly maddening things Bucky Barnes had done to him, entering the charts at number one with a bullet.

As a thumb _almost_ brushed his cheekbone, Steve lunged forwards, trying to claim Bucky's dick (so hard, so wet already) with his mouth. Bucky stepped away, using the exact amount of motion needed to evade Steve and not an iota more.

Steve groans. “Bucky, you are destroying me. Stop this. Come over here _now_.”

Bucky shakes his head, though he doesn't stop staring at him, devouring his body with his eyes.

“Bucky, please. Please. Do you want me to beg? I'll beg you. Get over here.”

Bucky shakes his head again, and that's when Steve notices that Bucky is so close to coming, he's needing to stop himself. His cock is purple, so hard and ready, dripping wet, and metal fingers circle its base hard to prevent the orgasm that's threatening to break him apart.

Steve grins and removes his fingers from himself. He folds his arms behind his head and lifts his chin defiantly. “Okay, then. I'm stopping. You want this, you have to finish the job yourself.”

Bucky narrows his eyes as he steps closer, calculating, wary. “I wish America knew what a little shit its captain was,” he says.

“Please,” Steve says, closing his eyes and adopting an air of superiority. “I'm the personification of truth and f--”

But then Bucky inserts two lubed-up metal fingers up Steve's ass, and all Steve can do is bite off a rough, “fffuuuuuh.”

“Well, if only America could see you now,” Bucky breathes. “Fuck, you're gorgeous.” Then he scissors his fingers and twists them around.

Steve arches and _keens_ , desperate for more but finding words harder and harder to make. He hopes Bucky can understand from the stuttered syllables and bitten-off groans what he wants.

Bucky can. He speaks fluent sex-wrecked Steve, and you could say it's his favourite of his many languages. He traces another finger around Steve's hole, and smiles when Steve manages a “ _Yesss_ ,” before curling the finger away and instead shoving his tongue in alongside the first two fingers.

Steve twists like a bronco and groans, “Stop, stop, Bucky, stop, I'm going to _explode_ \--”

Bucky mouths up his perineum and as he traces his lower lip over Steve's balls, he whispers, “Then explode. Come for me, Steve, we'll make this a double.”

And then because Bucky is the worst but also the best, without any warning he swallows Steve's cock down all the way.

Steve comes instantly and Bucky watches him as he swallows him down. Steve looks like an angel, a god, something far too perfect for a broken thing like Bucky, and Bucky will never stop worshipping this man who loves him and stays with him in spite of all his mess and moods and sharp edges.

Bucky closes his eyes, it's too much, and starts to shudder. He has to step back off the bed again, grabbing the base of his dick to stop the orgasm he's halfway to having, and he leans there against the bed for a moment, shaking, panting. Trying to get himself under control.

And Steve sees his chance for payback.

He grabs Bucky and tackles him to the bed, bodily throwing him down, and starts biting him wherever he can reach. Bucky cries out, hoarse and needy, and arches up into him as Steve runs his tongue up the ridge of Bucky's abs and starts sucking on a nipple, feeling it harden and contract beneath his tongue. And then of course it's not fair that one nipple's gotten all the attention, so Steve has to move on to the other. And then there's that spot on Bucky's neck that's part-ticklish and part-erotic, and then he has to bite Bucky's strong jawline and ugh, his lips are so close, and he could spend the rest of his life kissing Bucky and he'd never grow tired.

But, crucially, by now Bucky is distracted, and as they kiss, Steve squeezes some lube into the palm of his hand. Then as Steve breaks the kiss, and Bucky looks up at him through his lashes with a completely blissed-out expression of love, Steve runs his lubed hand over Bucky's dick.

And then he impales himself on Bucky's cock.

All the way to the hilt. It burns; Bucky is always thicker than Steve thinks he is, and it's _so good_. He feels so full--

Bucky throws his head back and bites back a scream as his whole body tenses. His hands shake as he puts them on Steve's thighs. “Steve, just wait a moment, jesus christ, don't move, I can't, god you are _evil_...”

Steve is also very, very hard again.

Bucky takes a couple deep, shuddering breaths, then looks up at Steve inquiringly as he rolls his hips. He watches as Steve groans and pushes himself down even further. “That thing?” Bucky says again, rolling his hips a little more.

Steve gasps. “No. No, that's amazing but it's not _the_ thing.”

Bucky bites his lip and looks thoughtful. Then he runs his hands up Steve's thighs and round to Steve's ass. He takes a moment to rub his hands over the perfect curve of Steve's rear before moving his thumbs around to grab Steve's hips hard, possessively. He lifts Steve up, almost off his dick.

Then he snaps his hips up hard at the same time that he rams Steve down on top of him.

Steve screams. “Oh god Bucky oh god _yes_ that's the thing--”

Bucky digs his thumbs into Steve's hips until it hurts. “Steve, shut up or I will gag you. These walls are thin as fuck.” Then he raises Steve up again, and Steve hopes Bucky hasn't noticed how his dick jerked and leaked at the mention of being gagged, of being tied up _(Bucky in his Winter Soldier uniform, tying him up, gagging him--)._ The moan that escapes Steve's lips at that thought is pornographic.

“Steve, listen to me. Can you be good?” Bucky asks, still holding Steve up so the head of Bucky's cock was barely inside him.

Steve bites his lip and nods yes.

Bucky grunts and snaps his hips up again, yanking Steve down on top of him with all his strength. It nails Steve's prostate and Steve grits his teeth not to scream out again because it was like heaven in a bottle, that one person could make another feel like this, feel this sort of exploding, cresting pleasure. He looks down at Bucky and whispers, “Harder, Bucky. _Harder_.”

Bucky _snarls_ and starts slamming into him, sitting up so Steve's dick is rubbing up against his stomach, his strong hands manipulating Steve's body as effortlessly as if Steve were still a 90lb weakling. He's _merciless_ , smashing into Steve's prostate every time. (Your lover being one of the greatest snipers of the modern era has its advantages.)

Steve feels the pleasure starting to crest impossibly high, and start to come apart again. He shudders and tightens down hard on Bucky's cock, and he's not going to be able to keep back another scream. Bucky's lip is still curled as he bites at Steve's mouth, dragging him in for a kiss.

Bucky silences Steve's scream with wet, messy, desperate kisses as Steve has his second orgasm. And while Bucky doesn't slow his relentless pace, his rhythm stutters and goes messy. He tears his lips away from Steve's mouth and then bites his neck, hard. Then Bucky throws his head back and comes, has the orgasm he's been denying himself all morning as he played with Steve. It feels like it lasts forever; Bucky feels like he can't possibly be on Earth any more, he's shot into some place on the astral plane where he's weightless and made of the sort of sparks of light Dazzler liked to fill the air with at her concerts.

Bucky came back to himself to find Steve stroking his hair, supporting him with an arm around his back and looking at him with not a little concern. “Sorry. That was, ah, intense,” he murmurs.

“And he's back,” Steve smiles, brushing his lips over Bucky's cheek.

They both roll down onto the bed, Bucky frowning a little as he slips out of Steve. He curls up, catlike, against Steve's chest and nuzzles in to his neck. “You've ruined me for sex with anyone else, Steve. M' just saying.”

Steve laughs and wraps his free arm around Bucky. “Yeah, same here,” he confesses. “When you lift me up, _fuck_... that _does_ things to me.”

“I dunno,” Bucky murmurs into Steve's chest. “Thor could lift you too.”

“Nah,” Steve says, rollings Bucky away from him. “Thor doesn't have _this_ ,” he continues, kissing up Bucky's left arm, from the fingers all the way up to the shoulder that now bore nobody's mark. “Or _these,”_ he says, kissing the network of scars across Bucky's chest and shoulders. “And he probably doesn't start swearing in gutter Russian when I go down on him. All these things are non-negotiable major turn-ons for me.”

Bucky snorts and settles into Steve's chest again, but Steve can feel the smile on his face as his lips press against him.

 

* * *

 

Alison wakes up late, to midmorning sunlight and the smell of bacon and pancakes and hot coffee. There are worse ways to get up. Well, most people would consider waking up to the Winter Soldier sitting a few feet away clutching a mug of coffee like it contained the answers to the world's salvation a pretty terrifying way to wake up, but La Vie de Dazzler had taken a sharp turn away from “most people” a long time ago.

She yawned and flung a pillow at Bucky. He was obviously feeling playful (and generous), as he let it hit him. The pillow bounced off his metal shoulder. The hand holding the coffee cup didn't budge.

“That coffee even affect you at all?” Alison said, getting out of bed and padding over to pour herself a cup as she glanced over Bucky. He wasn't in his work clothes, just his blue peacoat and a t-shirt and skinny jeans tucked into unlaced combat boots. He looked more like an off-duty fashion model than the century's most feared assasssin.

“Nah,” said Bucky. “Thanks, science nazis.”

Then Alison took another look at him; at the colour in his cheeks that hadn't been there yesterday. “You totally got laid, didn't you?”

“Classified,” Bucky said, around a sip of the coffee. But he smiled.

“Is he--” Alison began, glancing into the suite's living room for Steve. Then she saw the black duffel bags piled near the door. “Oh,” she said, her heart dropping like a stone.

“Yeah. Time for me to go,” Bucky said, his lips pressed into something between a smile and a frown as he put the mug down. He stood up and walked over, reaching his flesh arm out for a hug.

“Gonna miss you, stupid,” Alison said, putting her arms around him and burying her head in his chest.

Bucky dropped a kiss down into her hair. “Gonna miss you too.” Then he pushed her away so he could look her in the eyes. “My phone number changes all the time, but I'm going to give you one that will always work. It goes through a woman named Miriam. Just ask for me. You'll be on my whitelist, so she'll put you right through.”

Alison nodded and punched the number into her phone as Bucky gave it to her, saving it into her contacts simply as “B”.

“Now, as founding members of the No-Help, Can-Totally-Handle-This-By-Myself Club, do you promise to call me if you end up in a situation where a lot of violence is likely to happen? Not because you can't handle it, obviously. Just because I really _like_ violence.”

Alison stifled a giggle. “Okay, I promise.”

“Good,” Bucky said. “So, what are you up to next?”

“I am going to lock myself in a nice, safe studio and record some hella angry music. With catchy choruses and killer pre-chorus hooks. And if the label says it isn't the right sound for me, imma change labels,” said Alison. “How 'bout you?”

“Steve and I are going away for a while. One of his friends has a house way up in Maine, on the water, with nothing around it for miles. It's our first vacation, well, ever.” Bucky scratches the back of his neck. “And the whole being on TV thing... not good for my head.”

“Smart plan,” Alison said. “Because as well as TV, you're _definitely_ all over the internet.”

“Ugh,” Bucky groaned, wiping a metal hand down his face.

“No, most of it's really good. Your face kinda broke tumblr.”

“I... what?” Bucky said, confused.

Alison pulled out her phone, opened an app, punched in a hashtag search, then handed the phone to him. “Scroll down. And keep scrolling.”

Bucky looked at the app. It was all... slow-motion gifs of his face from his desperate plea the night before, with all sorts of comments or text over it. Plus a few old Howling Commandos photos, and some from the leaked Hydra files. Instagram photos of him and Alison at rehearsals, probably taken by the backup dancers. People had even drawn little portraits of him, some of them exceptionally good. He handed Alison back the phone, stunned. “It's... all girls? Who think I'm cute and need cuddles?”

“Quite a few guys, too.” Alison grinned.

“Huh,” said Bucky. People on tumblr seemed awfully willing to overlook his extensive history of bloody murder. He frowned. “Also, I am probably the most lethal person alive. I am not _cute_.”

“One, don't worry, there are about a billion 'Bucky Barnes: your fave is problematic' posts too. Two, you _are_ cute.”

Bucky growled at her, but only a little bit, because it was Alison. Then his face brightened. “They do this with pictures of Steve, too?”

“Hashtag Captain America.”

Bucky punched in a new search and was rewarded with a metric ton of portraits and photographs of Steve, all chosen for maximum hotness.

The future was a marvelous place.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter title song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WbP7jhi6euk
> 
> aaaugh, we're done! thank you for staying with this, it's been a hell of a journey! I've changed the rating from M to Explicit mostly because of this chapter because, yeah, 4,000 words of porn #sorrynotsorry
> 
> I'll be updating (I'm Friends With The) Monster soon. Sorry for delays but my brain went and made me write 15k words of post-CA:CW angst and fluff (Spotless, go see: http://archiveofourown.org/series/467503 ) last weekend and that distracted me for a while.
> 
> Also, if any of you are artists or know artists looking for Stucky Big Bang fics to illustrate, I have a fic in it! It's called Lucky Seven and is a Cap!Steve / Modern!Bucky AU. There will be hotness, motorcycles, and BAMFness. More info at thestuckylibrary.tumblr.com .
> 
> Also also, ah, the Markov assassination: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgi_Markov#Assassination what a hot mess that was


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